N'i::". 



•'H^i 




WHERE DO YOU STAND? 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

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WHERE 
DO YOU STAND? 

AN APPEAL TO AMERICANS 
OF GERMAN ORIGIN 



BY 

HERMANN HAGEDORN 



"Come, let us reason together* 



l^tm fork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 

All rights reserved 



^^^ 
^(^ 



v^^ 



Copyright, 1918 

By The McClure Publications 
Incorporated 



Copyright, 1918 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1918 



MAR 20 I9i8 

©CI.A494169 



TO 

THE MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHER 

FRIEDRICH SCHWEDLER 

A SAXON BY BIRTH, AN EXILE BY CHOICE, A 

STAUNCH AND SUCCESSFUL DEFENDER OF 

AMERICAN IDEALS BY THE GRACE 

OF HIS OWN HIGH SPIRIT 

He fled from Saxony after the revolution of 
1848 and 1849, leaving a thriving business and a 
congenial circle of fellow-musicians to find in 
America the freedom which his own country de- 
nied him. As editor and proprietor of the "New 
Yorker Demokrat" (now the "New Yorker Her- 
old") he vigorously fought, in New York through 
his daily, in the Middle West through his weekly, 
for the election of Lincoln in 1860. Lincoln, 
stopping in New York on his way to his first 
inauguration, sent for him and thanked him for 
his successful efforts in winning to his candidacy 
the support of German-Americans. To the day 
of his death, Friedrich Schwedler carried in his 
face like a consecration the memory of the thanks 
of Abraham Lincoln. 

For his valiant defence of the Union whose 
language he never mastered but whose ideals he 

V 



loved and served with single-minded devotion, he 
deserves to be remembered by his countrymen. 

His grandchildren who knew him not as a de- 
fender of a great cause but as a dear, slender old 
gentleman with snow-white hair and a ruddy skin 
and faded, childlike blue eyes — a snuff-box in his 
waistcoat and a red silk handkerchief trailing 
somewhere behind — will always remember him 
gratefully as their most 'welcome playmate. The 
"Kuss Walzer" and "Als ich noch im Fliigel- 
kleide" and certain bits of Chopin today retain 
for them a magic of their own which he, thirty 
or more years ago, first evoked from the keys. 

In the midst of a great battle, fellow American 
and fellow fighter, your old playmate salutes you! 

H. H. 

Sunnytop Farm, Fairfield, Connecticut, 

on Friedrich Schwedler's hundredth birthday, 
January 25, 1918. 



vl 



FATHERLAND 
(Winter 1914-1915) 

There is no sword in my hand 

Where I watch oversea. 
Father's land, mother's land, 

What will you say of me 
Who am blood of your German blood, 

Through and through, 
Yet would not, if I could 

Slaughter for you? 
What will you say of one 

Who has no heart 
Even to cheer you on? 

No heavens part. 
No guiding God appears 

To my strained eyes. 
Athwart the fog of fears 

And hates and lies, 
I see no goal ; I mark 

No ringing message flying; 
Only a brawl in the dark 

And death and the groans of the dy- 
ing. 



vn 



FATHERLAND 

I love you, German land, 

Your hills, your fields. 
Where cornflower and poppy stand 

Amid the golden yields. 
I love your forests; deep. 

And full of half -heard wonders 
Are they. The witches keep 
Their revels still to the thunder's 

Rolling music; and still 
Fairies run amid leaves 

Through the beeches and up the hill 
Where the ruined castle grieves 

For the dear, departed throngs, 
While up from the vale 

Come the palpitant, clear songs 
Of cuckoo and nightingale. 

I love your rivers. The Rhine 

For the sake of dear, lost hours 
Lives in this heart of mine. 

In its ancient towers 
Roland and Charlemagne 

And the plumed hosts 
From Askelon and Spain 

Were more than tedious ghosts 
Clanking through musty pages. 

For in these halls awoke 

viii 

t 



FATHERLAND 

The dead and ashen ages, 

And lived and glowed and spoke. 

I love your towns that dream 

Through the long warm day, 
Where the brown and laggard stream 

Takes his well-ordered way 
Silently, lest he rouse, 

Bewildered, aghast, 
The placid burghers that drowze 

In the quiet lap of the past. 
I love your market-places 

Where the Rathaus clock looks down 
On the weathered peasant faces 

And the ladies of the town, 
Bonnetted and mildly splendid. 

Haggling, with hot argument, 
As though all the world depended 

On the penny saved or spent. 
(I can hear the chatter now 

And see the queer, round hat 
And dowdy gown of the Frau 

berregierimgsrat ; 
And smell the odors, drifting 

Warmly among the stalls, 
And see the colors shifting 

Against the Square's grey walls. ) 



FATHERLAND 

I love the streets that slumber 

Silent and full of the past. 
Ghosts without number 

Are there ; and outlast 
The living that come and go 

With their day of laughter and pain ; 
For ever the great names glow 

On the walls and the ghosts remain. 

I love your songs ; to me 

They are of the kin of fire 
And wind and sea 

And all things that aspire 
Sunward and starward; glad 

As boyhood love in Spring; 
Tender as mother-pity, sad 

As men remembering 
June, amid falling leaves. 

Others have made high songs 
Of love and summer eves 

And swords and thongs. 
But your songs were not made. 

Out of the heart's deep pang 
As out of the scabbard the blade 

Shining and sharp they sprang. 
I love your dreamers 

That climb and ask not wings — 



FATHERLAND 

Patient and plodding schemers 

Of intricate, infinite things ; 
Your scholars, who labor and fall 

Unseen, unregarded, 
To fit one stone in the wall 

Of the temple, and die, rewarded 
If the stone shake not in the gale. 

Truly, they stand in the ranks 
Of heroes who died for the Grail 

And asked of nc man thanks. 

For you, your men of dreams 

And your strong men of deeds 
Crumble and die with screams 

And under hoofs like weeds, 
Are trampled ; for you 

In city and on hill 
Voices you knew 

And needed, are still; 
And roundabout 

Harbor and shoal 

The lights of your soul 
Go out. 
To what end, fatherland? 

I see your legions sweep 
Like waves up the grey strand. 

I hear your women weep. 



FATHERLAND 

And the sound is as the groaning 

Swish of the ebbing wave — 
A nation's pitiful moaning 

Beside an open grave. 
Ah, fatherland, not all 

Who love you most, 
Armed to conquer or fall 

March with your mighty host. 
Some there are yet, as I, 

Who stand apart 

And with aching heart 
Ponder the Whither and Why 
Of the tragic story. 

Crying with bated breath : 
Spirit I knew, can this be glory? 

Spirit beloved, this is death! 



The Author is indebted to the Editor of Poetry for 
permission to reprint these lines which in part ap- 
peared originally in that magdzine. 



Xli 



WHERE 
DO YOU STAND? 

AN APPEAL TO AMERICANS 
OF GERMAN ORIGIN 



WHERE do you stand? 
North and South, East and 
West, in every part of the country, 
that question is today being ad- 
dressed to us, Americans of German 
origin. In words; or if not in words, 
in glances; in hand-shakes less 
friendly than they used to be; in 
countless ways, that question is being 
put to us, morning, noon and night: 
Where do you stand? 

A few have by their actions an- 
swered that they stand first and last 
with Germany, and they have been put 
under lock and key. 



2 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

A greater number have declared 
unmistakably that they stand with 
America against Germany; and they 
have been greeted by their country- 
men as Americans who have been put 
to a bitter test and have not been found 
wanting. 

But the majority, the large majority, 
have not answered at all. In the face 
of that question, they have grumbled, 
hotly declaring their indignation that 
any one should dare for an instant to 
doubt their absolute loyalty to the 
United States. "I deny any one the 
right to ask me where I stand," they 
cry. "I am an American citizen. I 
have always been a conscientious 
citizen. As such I naturally support 
my government. To question my 
Americanism is an insult that I will 
not tolerate." 

They are absolutely sincere when 
they say that; and yet, may one not 
wonder whether they are quite awake 
to the gravity of their own situation or 
the peril of their country when they 
thus reject, as an affront, the simple 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 3 

request of their fellow-citizens that in 
this great crisis they declare them- 
selves clearly and unmistakably? 

"Why should we German- Americans 
alone be called upon to give evidence 
of our complete loyalty?" they cry. 
"It is not patriotism that prompts our 
neighbors to ask us were we stand. 
It is hatred, it is intolerance, it is the 
spirit of the Inquisition! We should 
be weak to bow to it. Not we are the 
ones who are faithless to the ideals of 
the Republic. Those who raise the 
race issue, those who cast distrust upon 
us, not because we have shown our- 
selves deserving of distrust, but be- 
cause we happen to have German 
names and German blood and German 
words on our lips — they are the ones 
who are faithless, they are the ones 
who are today splitting open our 
country. Do not come to us with your 
long faces, lamenting about a di- 
"uided people. Go to them! Show 
them the error of their ways and you 
will have the united nation you want. 
You will never achieve it by persecut- 



es 



4 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

ing a body of citizens, of proved in- 
tegrity and conscientiousness, merely 
because they are not of British origin. 
Never in this world!" 

Thus, or in similar words, these 
Americans of German blood answer 
the question: Where do you stand? 
Because they are naturally grieved at 
heart that the country of their adoption 
should be warring with the country of 
their origin, because possibly they are 
themselves convinced of their own 
complete loyalty to the United States, 
they are sensitive. They know that 
they have been excellent citizens in the 
past, that men of their race fought to 
build the Union and that others fought 
to preserve it, and that hundreds of 
thousands more have, year by year, in 
the city, the state and the nation stood 
with their ballots as bulwarks against 
public corruption. They are proud of 
their record — they have a right to be 
proud — and their pride has been hurt. 

And yet — is there not another side 
to the matter? 

We are engaged in a great war. 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 5 

This war involves not two nations only, 
but the whole world. It is not a war 
for the correction of a boundary, the 
possession of a colony, the monopoly 
of any trade route. The war is cost- 
ing each of the nations involved more 
in mere money in a week than any 
trade monopoly could yield them 
profits in a year, or any colony in 
ten years or any readjusted boundary 
in a hundred. This is not a war for 
dollars on either side. No men fight / 
for dollars the way the armies are 
fighting in France and Flanders. They ' 
fight thus only for religion or a prin- 
ciple. 

The principle for which Germany is 
fighting is the principle of government 
by centralized, monarchical control 
and supervision. The principle for 
which America and the Allies are fight- 
ing is the principle of government by 
popular control. 

This is not the place to endeavor to 
prove which principle is right and 
which principle is wrong. The essen- 
tial point is that in a war of principles 



6 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

such as this, in a war of conflicting 
political religions, the belligerents are 
divided not altogether by boundary 
lines but to a great extent by the per- 
jpnal convictions of individuals. A 
German like Liebknecht who is willing 
to go to prison because he thinks the 
principle for which Germany is fight- 
ing is wrong, is, in this War, not on 
the side of Germany but on the side of 
America and the Allies. A citizen of 
the United States, on the other hand, 
who believes that the principle for 
which Germany is fighting is right and 
the principle for which America 
and the Allies are fighting is wrong, 
is, in this War, not on the side of Amer- 
ica but on the side of Germany, and it 
is inessential whether his origin be 
German, French, English or Choctaw. 
The question is not: Where do you 
come from? but What are your con- 
victions? In a war merely between 
nations there may be intelligent indi- 
viduals in all the nations involved who 
may be neutral; but not in a war of 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 7 

conflicting principles. There are no 
neutrals in this war. 

Where do you stand? The question 
has been put to nations and to men 
again and again since that tragic day 
in 1914 when the Great War began. 
Turkey and Bulgaria answered it in 
one way; Serbia and Belgium an- 
swered it in another. Here in our 
own country, men began even in the 
first month of the War to ask them- 
selves the same question, and to ask 
it of their neighbors, knowing even 
then that this War involved issues so 
fundamental that no ties of friendship 
could long withstand a difference of 
conviction there. 

The same question. Where do you 
stand? was put to the government and 
the people of the United States. Not 
only the Allies, not only pro-Ally lead- 
ers in America, but, in a sense, even 
Germany herself put the question to us 
in every protesting word she spoke 
concerning America's dealings in loans 
and munitions with the Allies. ''He 



8 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

who is not for us is against us. Where 
do you stand?'' 

On April 2nd, 1917, the President 
gave his answer. 

To the President, to public officials, 
public leaders and private citizens of 
whatever origin all over the country, 
the question has been squarely put, 
'Where do you stand?^' and the ma- 
jority of them have squarely an- 
swered: "/ stand with and for the 
United States and against Germany f^ 

Why should we Americans of Ger- 
man origin be treated with more ten- 
der consideration than the President or 
than citizens of other origin? 



II 

THERE is no reason. There is, on 
the other hand, every reason why 
the question should be put to us. 

Before America's entrance into the 
[War, the majority of Americans of 
jGerman blood were frankly pro-Ger- 
man. The public utterances of their 
leaders, the resolutions adopted by 
their societies, the editorials in the 
Qerman language newspapers, reli- 
gious as well as secular, were all pro- 
German and bitterly opposed to any 
action in opposition to what the Gov- 
ernment considered not unjustly, to 
be Germany's infringement of Amer- 
ica's rights. That portion of the 
American people which is not of 
jGerman blood conceived, whether 
rightly or wrongly, the idea that 
jGerman-Americans regarded as right 
and just everything which Ger- 



10 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

many did or demanded; and regarded 
as utterly iniquitous any action which 
America might take in opposition to 
those deeds or in contravention of 
those demands. No German-Ameri- 
can leader, no German-American so- 
ciety or newspaper, ever publicly 
voiced any sincere indignation against 
the sinking of the Lusitania, which 
stands today and will always stand as 
the symbol of Germany's aggression 
against America's rights and Amer- 
ica's honor. The Americans who 
were not pro-German drew the con- 
clusion — mistaken, I believe — that 
Americans of German blood as a body 
approved and applauded that act. 

America is now at war if not solely 
at least incidentally in consequence of 
the destruction without warning of the 
Lusitania and other ships. 

The German-Americans for various 
reasons tacitly or openly approved of 
those sinkings. 

Can we, Americans of German 
blood, absolutely loyal as we may be, 
wonder that other Americans should, 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 11 

with a worried look, ask us, ''Sajy old 
man, where do you stand?'* 

To ask that question, not with 
rancor in the heart or fire in the eye 
but in all friendliness, is not a slur 
on any man's Americanism. It is not 
persecution. It is not an evidence of 
anti-German hysteria. It is plain 
common sense based on the estab- 
lished record of German-American 
opinion during the two and a half 
years preceding America's entrance 
into the War. During those years, we 
Americans of German origin permit- 
ted the rest of the American people to 
gather the impression that we were 
all, without exception and without re- 
serve, ardently and wholeheartedly for 
Germany and all its works. 

Can we blame them if they look 
upon us today in the light of that im- 
pression and say, "//i March you were 
for the Kaiser and you made no bones 
about it. Today, where do you 
standi 

Such a question cannot be dismissed 
with an indignant rebuke and a look of 



12 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

wounded pride and the general pro- 
test that an American of German 
origin is as good a patriot as any other 
American. Nor can it be satisfac- 
torily evaded by the declaration on the 
part of the man questioned that he does 
not recognize the hyphen but considers 
himself an American and nothing but 
an American and therefore refuses to 
answer questions based on the assump- 
tion that he is a German-American. 
We are dealing here not with the names 
of things but with the things them- 
selves. A man of recent German 
origin may rightly choose not to call 
himself a German-American. But 
that choice does not alter the fact that 
his origin is German. It does not alter 
the fact that a great many other peo- 
ple of the same origin have for several 
years, in season and out of season, 
publicly and privately, expressed their 
unmodified approval of all Germany's 
words, deeds, methods and ambitions. 
He may call himself a red Indian or a 
pink carnation, but the fact remains 
that he is a man of German blood to 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 13 

whom other Americans have a right 
in this crisis to say, ''Neighbor, this is 
a difficult business for you, isn't it? 
I'm sorry as the devil for you. But — 
so there won't be any misunderstand- 
ing — tell me exactly, where do you 
stand?" 

German-Americans have been asked 
that question again and again, and the 
majority have, in the face of it, clung 
to a half scornful, half indignant si- 
lence. 

The average American of other 
blood than German is by nature quick 
in jumping at conclusions, a little too 
quick. Under the lash of war he is 
inclined to be even quicker. Because 
an American with a German name and 
a German cast of features refuses per- 
sistently to declare himself for Amer- 
ica and against Germany, this average 
American has a tendency to stamp on 
his hat and cry, "This man is a damned 
traitor!" 

That assumption is in nine thousand 
nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out 



14 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

of ten thousand absurd. Americans 
of German origin, with the exception 
of a dastardly few, are absolutely 
loyal to the government of the United 
States. They consider themselves 
Americans and nothing but Americans. 
Some of them take pride in believing 
that they are the only true Americans 
remaining. All others, they declare, 
have yielded themselves, body and 
soul, to England. 

To them, America's entrance into 
the War is, in a sense, a soul's tragedy. 
To them, America is merely the dupe' 
of England, bound to her inveterate 
enemy by links of gold forged by 
American financiers and munition- 
makers. America, they bitterly com- 
plain, has again become a British 
colony. 

"You ask where do we stand?" they 
cry. "Are we not giving our sons to 
the army and navy, our hard-earned 
money to the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. 
A., the Liberty Loans? What more do 
you want of us? Do you expect us 
to shout with enthusiasm for a war 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 15 

into which we believe America should 
never have entered? We are doing 
our share. We are doing more 
than many Americans whose fore- 
fathers came over in the Mayflower. 
Let America accept that and be 
satisfied and not ask us to stand in the 
streets reviling the country of our 
fathers." 

There are hundreds of thousands of 
Americans of German origin who hold 
that attitude. They are loyal, and 
they give what they are able to give 
to attest their loyalty, but their heart 
is not in their gifts. They are ag- 
grieved, they are embittered with the 
bitterness of the man who feels, rightly 
or wrongly, that he has not been given 
a "square deal." 



Ill 

WHEREIN does the American of 
German origin believe that he 
has been unjustly treated? 

Here, in brief, are his grievances: 
He believes that from the very be- 
ginning of the Great War, the attitude 
of the American government was un- 
neutral favoring the Allies, espe- 
cially England, and discriminating 
cruelly against Germany. He claims 
that in the face of British aggression 
our government was weak, while in 
the face of Germany's most moderate 
demands, it was relentless and hard. 
It protested vociferously, for instance, 
against Germany's proclamation of a 
war zone about the British Isles, though 
it had remained silent when England 
several months previously had issued 
a similar proclamation concerning the 
North Sea. It insisted on hampering 

16 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 17 

the activities of Germany's submar- 
ines, he claims, but accepted meekly 
all of England's Orders in Council in 
regard to contraband, the blockade and 
the blacklisting of American business 
houses. English mines, he contends, 
sank as many American ships without 
warning as German submarines. But 
instead of protesting, the American 
government surrendered its soul into 
the hands of the British Foreign Office 
and obediently declared war against 
Germany. 

There, briefly, are the German- 
American's grievances against the 
American government. Some of them 
are fantastic, some have a measure of 
truth behind them; all of them are 
sincere and deeply felt. None of 
them is to be lightly thrown aside by 
other Americans, as inconsequential. 
No belief, however mistaken, is in- 
consequential when it is fervently held 
and passionately defended by thou- 
sands or hundreds of thousands of in- 
telligent individuals. 

But these are not all of the griev- 



18 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

ances which have temporarily embit- 
tered the American of German origin. 
He has grievances not only against 
the American government but also 
against the American people, espe- 
cially the leaders in journalism, busi- 
ness and finance who, he contends, 
persisted in the most unneutral fashion 
in discriminating in favor of England 
and against Germany. He believes, 
for instance, that the most important 
newspapers in the country were at the 
opening of the War bought with cold 
cash by England and that American 
editors surrendered themselves, body 
and brain, to the dictation of the Brit- 
ish Foreign Office. He contends that 
news favorable to Germany was sup- 
pressed and news unfavorable to her 
cause or her reputation either invented 
or richly colored. The whole story 
of German atrocities, he believes, is 
a legend created by mendacious Brit- 
ish correspondents, and sent forth over 
neutral countries under the lustre of 
Lord Bryce's honored name in order 
to persuade neutral opinion that the 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 19 

hitherto gentle and peace-loving Ger- 
man had suddenly become a raving 
barbarian. 

There is no arguing this conviction 
with the German-American; and this 
is not the place to cite indisputable 
evidence of eye-witnesses. Whether 
our sympathies have in the past been 
with the cause of the Allies or the 
cause of Germany, we Americans of 
German origin cannot allow ourselves 
to revive issues which as far as our 
present duty is concerned are dead and 
buried and must not be disinterred. 
At this time it is important only to cite 
them in order to set before other 
Americans the grievances which a 
large majority of German-Americans 
held and in part still hold against their 
government and their fellow-citizens. 

The German-American believes that 
the majority of American newspapers 
wilfully misrepresented Germany's 
aims and political philosophy, her his- 
tory, her form of government, the at- 
titude of her rulers toward the com- 
mon people, her methods of warfare; 



20 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

inciting America to hatred of Germany 
and all things German by flaunting in 
misleading headlines the statements of 
German extremists and exaggerating 
beyond all reason the influence of cer- 
tain rabid militarists like Bernhardi 
and Treitschke who, he declares, were 
without influence in Germany. He in- 
sists that air raids over defenceless 
towns were initiated not by Germany 
but by France in an attack on the city 
of Nuremberg during the first days 
of August 1914; and not even the evi- 
dence of Nuremberg newspapers to 
the contrary will in this matter con- 
vince him of his error. 

The German-American contends, 
furthermore, that American bankers 
committed a series of unneutral acts, 
in contravention of international law, 
in loaning large sums of money to the 
Allies during the years before America 
entered the War. He contends, be- 
yond this, that the traffic with the Allies 
in arms and ammunition was not only 
inhuman but unneutral; that America, 
while professing neutrality and friend- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 21 

ship for Germany, was actually doing 
her utmost to help defeat Germany. 
He believes absolutely that without 
this assistance from the United States, 
the Allies would have been defeated in 
1915. 

Here again are questions which the 
march of events have relegated to the 
limbo of dead issues. There is no 
use today in discussing them, in point- 
ing out that Germany herself has al- 
ways insisted on trafficking in muni- 
tions at all times and with all coun- 
tries; that an American embargo would 
have created a precedent which might 
at some later date have worked to our 
own disaster; that Germany herself 
floated a loan in the United States early 
in the war and that German language 
newspapers advised their readers to 
invest in it. We Americans of Ger- 
man origin are seeTcing here not to ac- 
cuse any of our fellow citizens of Ger- 
man or other blood, of unreason, of 
lack of logic. War is not a matter of 
reason; it is a matter of emotion. No 
man and no nation can fight because 



22 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

cold logic tells them they should. 
They fight because in certain cases 
something higher than reason or in 
other cases something lower than rea- 
son tells them that they must. War 
has a tendency to cloud logic always, 
because it inevitably inflames the emo- 
tions, and in war as in love, the heart 
has a way of playing ducks and drakes 
with the intellect. 

To ask strict logic of the German- 
American is to ask more than the 
American of other than German blood 
has been able at all times to show. It 
is not important today to prove or dis- 
prove the ability of the German-Amer- 
ican under stress of terrifying events 
to reason clearly. It is, on the other 
hand, tremendously important, in or- 
der that his fellow citizens of other 
origins may understand him better 
than they do, to record his emotions. 

The German- American believes that 
he has not been given a "square deal." 
Government, the newspapers, finance, 
big business, have all, he contends, 
discriminated wantonly and most un- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 23 

justly against the country to which in 
time of her peril his natural affections 
turned. This hostility toward Ger- 
many as a nation, fed by unjust vilifi- 
cation, extended itself, he contends, 
long before America entered the War, 
to hostility to all things German in the 
United States. Though he may not be 
able to produce tangible proofs, he be- 
lieves firmly that, fostered by British 
propaganda, there has in the United 
States long been under way a deliber- 
ate persecution of Germans and Ger- 
manism, aimed to crush out what he 
considers the liberalizing influences of 
Teutonic ideas with "the muckerdom 
of English puritanism." He consid- 
ers the recent attacks on the German 
language newspapers and on the teach- 
ing of German in the schools as a part 
of this cold-blooded and narrow- 
minded campaign ; a malicious and un- 
patriotic endeavor on the part of its 
promoters to take advantage of the 
anti-German passions engendered by 
the War to annihilate the rights and 
influence of the most solid and most 



24 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

loyal element in the American people. 

Germany and the German-Ameri- 
cans have, in the eyes of the American 
of German origin of whom we speak, 
had a "raw deal." 

What answer have the great body 
of Americans, who think otherwise, to 
give him? 



IV 

THIS is no time, we repeat, for any 
American citizen of whatever 
birth or blood to attempt to justify or 
refute grievances which had their 
origin in issues which today are as 
dead as Babylon and Heliopolis. 
These things belong to the past, to those 
"mute, inglorious" years whose mem- 
ory we trust the grand sweep of this 
present time to cover with charitable 
wings. 

The American government and that 
majority of the American people 
which is of other than Teutonic origin, 
in those years, the German-American 
believes, committed grievous errors, 
acts of bitter injustice, sins of omis- 
sion and commission which he finds it 
difficult to forgive. We have recorded 
what he believes those errors and those 
acts to have been. 

25 



26 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

They belong to yesterday. May 
they rest in peace. 

It is now only fair, however, be- 
fore we consign these also to the grave, 
that we record the grievances which 
Americans of other stock than Ger- 
man held and to some extent still 
hold against the German-Americans. 
Whether these grievances are justified 
or not, a statement of them may to some 
exteni make clear to German-Ameri- 
cans the reason why the rest of the 
American people now go to them, ask- 
ing, Where do you stand? 

At the very beginning of the Great 
War, a week before the first gun was 
fired by whatever nation did fire it, 
which is immaterial here, the sense of 
fair play of the American people was 
roused by Austria's ultimatum to 
Serbia. The American people were, 
as a whole, ignorant of Balkan issues. 
They knew nothing of the rights and 
wrongs of Austria in, Serbia. They 
saw a great Power threatening a weak 
people and, rightly or wrongly, irre- 
spective of whatever the underlying 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 27 

facts may have been, their sympathies \ 
were aroused for the under-dog. 
When, ten days later, Germany deliv- 
ered what seemed to Americans a 
brutal ultimatum of her own to another 
weak people, and like Serbia, Belgium, 
wisely or unwisely, rose up with a 
shout to repel the invader, the great 
mass of the American people jumped 
with their usual speed to the conclusion 
that the Teutonic Powers were black- 
guards and bullies, and France, Eng- 
land, Belgium, Serbia and even im- 
perial Russia were saintl^defendera^ . 
of the oppressed. Whether this con- 
clusion was or was not, in the light 
of later events, justified is not the 
point at issue. The point is that in 
the very first week of the War, a cer- 
tain firm conviction took hold of a 
great number of Americans, especially 
leaders of opinion. Rightly or 
wrongly, these Americans became con- 
vinced thus at the very outset that the 
Allies were defending their hearths 
and homes against a modern species of 
Robber Baron. Statements of Ger- 



/ 



28 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

many's intellectual leaders convinced 
them, furthermore, that this War was 
not a sudden, reckless, unreasoning ex- 
cursion, but the sober result of a po- 
litical philosophy which was as far re- 
moved as A is from Z from the politi- 
cal philosophy on which American 
institutions stand. Gradually, they 
came to believe that the success of Ger- 
many in this War would almost auto- 
matically involve the downfall of the 
democratic ideal. Believing this, 
they began to preach the crusade 
against the German idea. They 
preached loud and they preached long. 
Meanwhile, German statesmanship 
seemed to justify their preachments. 
The submarine campaign brought al- 
most daily evidence to prove their 
seemingly most reckless statements 
concerning the "German menace." 
They preached successfully. We are 
embarked on the crusade. 

Whether these Americans were 
right or whether they were wrong in 
believing that Germany threatened the 
very soul of America, that thing they 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 29 

did believe. Germany's point of view 
and the methods with which German 
leaders sought to enforce it seemed 
to them barbaric and subversive of all 
the laboriously created traditions of 
humanity and civilization. 

Burning with this conviction, they 
could not understand how any man 
who had lived in America and breathed 
the clear air of democratic institutions 
and ideals, could, for an instant, de- 
fend Germany or regard with anything 
except horror the possibility of a Ger- 
man victory. 

The majority of the German-Ameri- 
cans, meanwhile, seeing the War from 
a different angle and believing, not 
unnaturally, the German version of 
the War's origin and its conduct by 
the different nations party to it, en- 
thusiastically supported Germany and 
all its works. 

This is the first grievance of the 
average American against the Amer- 
ican of German blood, that he, 
a free citizen of the Republic, should 
have identified himself as wholeheart- 



30 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

edly as he did with the cause of a 
government based on principles funda- 
mentally opposed to those on which 
the United States were founded. The 
German-American, he complains, ac- 
cepted Germany's aims, methods, pre- 
tensions, self-justifications and self- 
glorifications without critical exami- 
nation, at Germany's own valuation. 
In a sense he was more pro-German 
than the Chancellor himself, for the 
Chancellor had admitted that in in- 
vading Belgium Germany had done 
a great wrong; but this the German- 
American never would admit. He 
had nothing but praise for Germany's 
leaders; nothing but praise for every 
deed they did and every word that 
came out of their mouths. Their of- 
ficial bulletins and notes, of which in 
the course of time the United States 
received their share, he regarded as 
rather more trustworthy than the 
Gospel. 

The average American resented the 
unquestioning allegiance which dur- 
ing the first years of the War the Ger- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 31 

man-American appeared to be show- 
ing to the Kaiser and all that the 
Kaiser typified. He began to resent 
it more intensely when the clash of 
Germany's "military necessity" and 
America's rights as a nation brought 
the two countries sharply face to face, 
and the German-American in conse- 
quent arguments almost invariably 
took the German side. 

Examined at a distance, in the 
cooler mood of the historian dissect- 
ing the corpse of a dead issue, the 
average American, whose mental atti- 
tude we are here attempting to make 
clear to his fellow-citizen of German 
origin, might today admit that his re- 
sentment against his fervently pro- 
German neighbor did not fully take 
into account human nature or give full 
credit to the German- American for the 
exhibition of certain lovable, Ameri- 
can qualities which largely determined 
this average American's own attitude 
toward the War, and which, in himself, 
he considered rather praiseworthy. 

The German-American, it appears, 



32 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

also has a keen sense of fair play. 
The German-American also has a 
natural tenderness for the under-dog. 
The American of English or French 
stock, with his eyes on the situation in 
Europe, saw Belgium, Serbia and 
France as the oppressed nations; the 
German-American, with his eyes 
mainly on the situation in the United 
States, considered Germany as the 
poor, abused brother. Both were in- 
tolerant; both, as a rule, were supplied 
only scantily with a knowledge of ac- 
tual conditions in any of the warring 
countries, with a background of his- 
tory or with a firm grasp of the funda- 
mental issues; both, in the heat and 
exigency of debate, presented the situ- 
ation in extreme black and white with 
no shading. England was the devil 
with hoofs and a spiked tail, or Ger- 
many was the devil, similarly adorned. 
Neither gave consideration to the possi- 
bility that though one side might be 
predominantly right, the other side 
need not therefore be altogether satan- 
'ically wrong. There was warrant 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 33 

enough in history to withhold from 
either set of belligerents the immedi- 
ate award of harp, halo and wings. 

The German-American resented bit- 
terly the sanctification of all things per- 
taining to the Allies ; he resented espe- 
cially what seemed to him a very orgy 
of anglomania. The American of 
different origin, on the other hand, re- 
sented quite as bitterly the German- 
American's assumption that Germany 
was more or less the perfect nation, 
mentally, morally, politically, philo- 
sophically and culturally. He re- 
sented such actual outbursts as this 
made in 1916: "I tell you, Germany 
is the one nation whose hands at the 
end of this War will be seen to be 
absolutely, spotlessly clean! I tell 
you, Germany today stands so high in 
exalted, moral eminence, that no other 
nation on earth is fit to be named in 
the same breath with her — " and so 
forth and so on. 

The average American, whose point 
of view we are here attempting to lay 
bare, resented what seemed to him the 



34 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

German-American's extreme partisan- 
ship from the very beginning of the 
Great War; he resented it with in- 
creasing bitterness when Germany be- 
gan not only to interfere with Amer- 
ican rights and destroy American prop- 
erty but also, rather more ruthlessly 
than seemed necessary, began to take 
American lives. The German-Ameri- 
can's contention that England had been 
the first and was still the most flagrant 
off"ender against international mari- 
time law and the neutrality of the 
United States passed over his head and 
left about as much impression there as 
a flock of swallows flying south. Law 
or no law, the average American felt 
instinctively and rightly that though 
stealing — granting the German-Amer- 
ican's contention that it was stealing — 
may be reprehensible, it is not to be 
compared as a crime, with murder. 
Locked in a room with a man who 
wanted his life and another man who 
wanted only his property, it was 
natural common sense for the average 
American with whom we are dealing to 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 35 

whisper to the latter, "Here's my 
pocket-book. If you think you need 
it to deal properly with that dangerous 
fellow over there, all right and bless 
you. I'll send you a bill — and don't 
you forget it — but I won't send it until 
you're through fighting. Meanwhile, 
I'd be obliged if you'd kindly stand 
between me and that fellow's gun." 

It was a mistake, perhaps, that 
Americans who believed that the Allies 
were right and that Germany was 
wrong, spoke as though America were 
really neutral. On the part of the 
government, perhaps, it was a neces- 
sary diplomatic fiction. For, of 
course, America was not neutral, for 
her neutrality was, especially toward 
England, of that benevolent variety 
which only the eye of an expert can 
tell from frank partisanship. The 
German-American damned America's 
attitude as hypocritical; the American 
of other leanings accepted it as, for 
the moment, inevitable and as reason- 
ably just. 

The diplomatic conflict between 



36 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

Germany and the United States, mean- 
while, became more and more acute 
and the opinion among American citi- 
zens on both sides became increasingly 
violent. The average American re- 
sented and resents today the fact that 
in every fresh dispute the German- 
American took Germany's side, ac- 
cepted as indisputable Germany's ar- 
guments, and treated with scorn, deri- 
sion and anger the words and the ac- 
tions of America's official and unoffi- 
cial leaders in defence of American 
rights and American lives. He re- 
sented with growing mistrust the atti- 
tude of German language newspapers 
all over the country which poured over 
the heads of the President of the United 
States and all others who spoke openly 
and hotly concerning what seemed to 
them wanton and inhuman aggression, 
the vials of bitterest contempt and de- 
nunciation; and which, at the same 
time, had no word of censure for Ger- 
many or any of its leaders except those 
who, like Liebknecht, represented in 
Germany the democratic point of view. 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 37 

For those Germans and for those only- 
it had denunciation or ridicule. 

Is the American of other blood than 
German altogether to be blamed if, re- 
membering those things, he asks the 
German-American today, Where do 
you stand? 



SURELY, he has a right to ask it, 
for during the past three years, 
the German-Americans of position and 
influence who represent the unques- 
tionably loyal majority of Americans 
of German origin, have been silent, 
driven from public life to the obscur- 
ity and protection of their firesides by 
what seemed to them the intolerance of 
Americans who were of other blood 
than theirs, leaving the leadership of 
German-Americans to editors and 
others whose sympathies were undis- 
guisedly and above all with Germany. 
Among these were American citizens 
of German blood or birth who, as edi- 
tors of German language newspapers, 
saw in the War a heaven-sent opportu- 
nity to restore the dwindling prestige, 
circulation and advertising of their 
newspapers; and certain other editors 

38 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 39 

of newspapers and periodicals printed 
in English who, for dollars or noto- 
riety or both, played on the prejudices 
of the German-Americans. In the 
same class were politicians who hun- 
gered for that elusive and undeliver- 
able quantity, the "German vote"; a 
few small but in certain German social 
circles influential folk who had been 
dined and wined by the Kaiser; a very 
much larger group who had business 
interests in Germany which would suf- 
fer in case of a German defeat ; and a 
vast number of good but unimagina- 
tive parsons, school-teachers and oth- 
ers who failed to comprehend the 
meaning of the lives of men like Carl 
Schurz and Abraham Jakobi in 1848 
and Liebknecht and Nicolay in 
1917, which is, that a man may love 
German hills and woods and rivers 
and castles and fairies, German 
women and German song, and still be 
able and willing to oppose with heart 
and brain and hand a system of which 
the Kaiser is the glittering symbol. 
Those men were, with a few excep- 



40 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

tions, good people, loyal to the best 
they knew, but they were not good 
leaders. They were will-o'-the-wisps 
beckoning their fellows into perilous 
marshes. 

There were other leaders, clear- 
eyed, fully conscious whither they 
were leading, responsible; but re- 
sponsible neither to the American gov- 
ernment, the American people nor to 
a conscience nurtured on American 
ideals. They were German citizens, 
enjoying the hospitality of the United 
States, employes in part of the German 
government, German professors, re- 
sponsible only to the government which 
employed them and to a conscience, 
seeing rights and wrongs from the 
angle of a Prussian Ministry of Edu- 
cation. 

There were still other leaders, re- 
sponsible, and by reason of their posi- 
tion doubly obligated to steer the 
opinions and emotions of their fellow- 
Americans of German origin wisely 
and carefully among the rocks and 
shoals that lay about them; not to in- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 41 

fluence their passions but to call upon \ 
their reason; to consider not Ger- ^ 
many and Germany's rights and 
wrongs so much as America's difficult 
international position and their own 
place in a land which, however unjust 
it might for the moment appear to the 
cause which was naturally close to^ 
their hearts, had, after all, hospitably 
received them and given them a free- 
dom of one sort or another which they 
had not found in the land they had 
left. These leaders were the official 
heads of the thousands of German- 
American social, literary and athletic 
clubs scattered over the country, and of 
the National German-American Al- 
liance, an organization with branches 
in almost every State, whose avowed 
purpose is the extension in the United 
States of German culture and the Ger- 
man language. These leaders have 
unquestionable power and they exer- 
cised it by means of addresses at fre- 
quent conventions and mass meetings 
and by other public statements, which 
could not help having their effect on 



42 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

thousands and hundreds of thousands 
of German-Americans who were dis- 
turbed and puzzled to know exactly 
where they belonged. 

These hundreds of thousands were 
no different from the majority of their 
fellow citizens of other stock than 
German insofar as they had never been 
taught to think deeply on political 
problems and knew next to nothing of 
international affairs. They wanted 
some one to tell them what attitude 
they, as German-Americans, must in 
good conscience take in reference to 
the War in Europe and to the relations 
between Germany and the United 
States. They wanted leadership. 

And they got it. 

It is the most obvious of platitudes 
that when the wise men of a nation 
choose to cling to the seclusion and 
peace of their own hearthstones, the 
government is run by knaves or fools. 
This is not the place to make subtle 
discriminations concerning the char- 
acter, the ability and the vision of 
the men who took it upon themselves 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 43 

to tell Americans of German origin 
that their future prestige and happi- 
ness depended on a German victory. 
They were demagogues, German- 
American "leaders" by profession, 
who had been so busy evolving schemes 
and ever new schemes for building up 
German influence in the United States 
(which meant incidentally their own 
personal influence) that they had never 
really acquainted themselves with 
those ideals of life and government 
which make up the American concep- 
tion of democracy. Those men are 
not to be blamed. They led, it is 
only fair to believe, as their individual 
consciences dictated. 

The men who are really to be 
blamed, the men who are really culpa- 
ble of the grave misunderstanding 
which exists today between the Ameri- 
can of German origin and his fellow- 
citizen of other stock, are those men 
of German blood and wide reputation 
who have in the past, in countless ways, 
in our civic and national life, shown 
their ability as leaders, but who in 



44 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

this crisis played the sullen Achilles, 
sulking in their tents because they con- 
sidered themselves ill-used. They are 
men of education, in part they are men 
of learning, in part they are men of 
high social position, men without ques- 
tion whose words would carry weight 
if they cared to speak them. 

But they did not care to speak. 
Not one of them raised his voice 
against the pompous drivel of the 
German-American Alliance orators. 
These cultivated gentlemen of German 
origin who protested loudly that they 
were Americans and nothing but 
Americans, spoke no word to refute 
the statement of the president of the 
Alliance, "We have long suffered the 
preachment that you Germans must 
allow yourselves to be assimilated, 
'you must merge in the American peo- 
ple'; but no one will ever find us pre- 
pared to descend to an inferior culture. 
No! We have made it our aim to ele- 
vate the others to our level." That 
piece of pernicious buncombe passed 
unchallenged by the German-Ameri- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 45 

cans of intelligence and influence. If 
they realized at all its inevitably 
dangerous effect on the average Amer- 
ican they did not bother to combat it. 
Parlor politicians, parlor strategists, 
parlor Germans and parlor Ameri- 
cans, they preferred to stay home and 
grumble at everything and everybody 
except the Kaiser. 

That does not mean that they are or 
that they were actually disloyal to the 
United States. But it does mean that 
they were, and in part still are, emas- 
culated arm-chair kickers, smug as 
eunuchs in a harem in their aloofness 
to the passions of men ; uninspired and 
uninspiring neutrals, who love Amer- 
ica a little but not enough to use the 
influence they possess to help her, and 
who love Germany a little, but not 
enough to give them a certain feeling 
of responsibility for their fellow citi- 
zens of German origin. 

And there we come to the crux of 
the matter of German-American lead- 
ership in this country. The men of 
education, ability and position among 



46 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

Americans of German origin consti- 
tute to a large extent a self-con- 
scious and exclusive caste, a social 
Four Hundred, which has no more use 
for Hans, Fritz, Ludwig and Heinrich, 
who meet at their Skatclubs and bowl- 
ing alleys, than any other snob has for 
any other "social inferior." They 
have their own luxurious clubs and 
they would no more think of taking 
part in the activities of the societies 
to which Heinrich belongs than a Fifth 
Avenue dandy would think of joining 
actively in the work of his district po- 
litical organization. 

"Where do you stand?" asks the 
American of other than German origin. 

"You have no business to ask me 
that," responds this German-American. 
"I am an American citizen. It is an 
insult to question my loyalty," and so 
forth and so on. 

"But," persists the other, "the Ger- 
man-American Alliance and similar 
organizations, professing to speak with 
authority for the Americans of German 
blood in the United States, have in the 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 47 

past three years issued statements so 
violently pro-German that the question 
is really a perfectly natural and legiti- 
mate one to ask." 

"The German- American Alliance!" 
exclaims the first in derision. "You 
don't think I'd have anything to do with 
that aggregation of singers and turn- 
ers and ten-pin experts? You forget. 
I am not a German-American. I am 
not hyphenated in any way. I am an 
American and nothing but an Amer- 
ican." 

That protestation is in itself, as far 
as it goes, admirable. But it does not 
go very far. In its attitude toward 
America it is about as convincing as 
any other piece of stump eloquence; 
in its attitude toward the German blood 
which flows in our veins, whether we 
like it or not (and some of us do like 
it and still dare to be proud of it), it 
is about as loyal as the disciple who 
cried with an oath, "I do not know the 
man." Indeed, the men who make it, 
while, in their unwillingness to criti- 
cize anything pertaining to Germany, 



48 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

pretending to be loyal to their Ger- 
man origin, are actually disloyal to 
it inasmuch as they refuse to use the 
influence which that very origin may 
at this time give them with their fel- 
low citizens of like origin. 

The hyphen is not in itself a dis- 
grace. In its ordinary significance it 
means only that our fathers, instead of 
coming to America in the Mayflower 
in Sixteen Twenty came in the Bre- 
men or the Borussia in the Eighteen 
Fifties or the Werra or the Lahn in 
the Eighteen Nineties. The hyphen 
is a disgrace only when it signifies 
divided allegiance. For a certain 
type of German-American vociferously 
to deny his origin blinks the fact that 
German blood is German blood. It 
blinks the further fact that the speaker 
thus vigorously denying his German- 
Americanism is probably himself a 
member of a German club of one 
exclusive sort or another. It blinks 
still further the fact that, whether we 
like it or not, a good many hundreds of 
thousands of Americans, who freely 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 49 

admit their German origin, have or- 
ganized themselves into countless sing- 
ing societies and other social, athletic 
and literary clubs having a wide influ- 
ence; and it leaves these hundreds of 
thousands to the tender mercies of any 
ambitious and clever demagogue who 
takes it into his head to lead them 
astray. 

In recording the grievances which 
the American of other than German 
stock has held and in part still holds 
against his German-American fellow 
citizens, it is highly important to con- 
sider the consequence on public opin- 
ion in America of the inept leadership 
which was all that the snobbish or sul- 
len indifference of the men who might 
have led wisely allowed the German- 
Americans to have. 

For two years before America de- 
clared war on Germany, there was, we 
well remember, a long epistolary bat- 
tle between President Wilson and the 
German Foreign Office. The average 
American was intensely interested. 



50 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

during that period, in what the Ameri- 
can of German origin thought of the 
whole business. He recognized that 
the Germ an- American had no easy 
choice to make. He recognized, fur- 
thermore, that on the choice the Ger- 
man-American did make might rest the 
future unity of the Republic. He 
naturally hoped that, whatever might 
be the exact attitude which the Ger- 
man-American would take, it would be 
an attitude based on conclusions 
freshly and discriminatingly reasoned 
from premises as strictly American as 
the inevitable intrusion of certain 
natural sentiments would permit. 

But the "leaders" of the German- 
Americans in newspaper offices and on 
executive committees were, thanks to 
the indifference of the peeved Achil- 
leses, on the whole not of the cali- 
bre carefully to examine and judge 
on its own merits each new act, demand 
or justification of the German govern- 
ment. Under ordinary circumstances 
it is difficult enough calmly to sift evi- 
dence against your own flesh and blood 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 51 

or to weigh with cool discrimination 
the defence of a brother, supposed to 
be a self-respecting moral citizen and 
now charged of a sudden with every 
crime on the calendar beginning with 
murder and ending with God knows 
what. Surrounded and harassed as 
they felt by what appeared to them un- 
just and brutal denunciation of Ger- 
many and all things German, these 
"leaders" seem to have surrendered 
their prerogative of individual judg- 
ment, then and there, and decided to 
eat — neck, feet and feathers — every 
bird the German government cared to 
set before them. 

In so surrendering their right and 
their duty of judicial criticism, these 
so-called "leaders" lost utterly their 
opportunity to temper the growing in- 
dignation of Americans toward Ger- 
many. They overplayed their game 
at the very beginning. They whistled 
Germany's tune to the last sharp and 
the last flat. ' They consequently be- 
came not a force but merely an echo; 
an echo of a voice, moreover, which 



52 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

the average American found extremely 
discordant. When, therefore, they 
cried for an embargo on arms or 
against the sailing of Americans on 
English ships, insisting that only 
American needs and only American 
ideals underlay their demands, Amer- 
icans of other stock merely shrugged 
their shoulders and said, "This is 
damn hypocrisy! They want it be- 
cause Germany wants it. They can 
go plumb to the devil!" 

From first to last, the men who set 
themselves up as leaders and mould- 
ers of opinion among German-Ameri- 
cans were indistinguishable in their 
arguments from similar leaders in Ger- 
many itself. The great body of Amer- 
icans of German origin, anxious to be 
shown where amid the confusion of 
many tongUes lay the truth and their 
own highest duty, accepted the state- 
ments of their leaders with a naive 
docility for which we who are of Ger- 
man blood are not unjustly said to be 
famous; and became to all intents and 
purposes individual phonograph rec- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 53 

ords, giving out here, there and every- 
where the siren-music of the German 
Foreign Office. 

From Maine to California, from 
Oregon to Texas, from Porto Rico to 
the Philippines, we have made that 
music heard. 

Is it to be wondered that today men 
are asking of us. Where do you stand? 



VI 



IT is unfortunate, beyond words, that 
the emotional rather than intellec- 
tual leadership which in this crisis 
guided the destinies of German- Ameri- 
cans, should have held constantly be- 
fore the rank and file the wrongs and 
the desires of Germany rather than 
the rights and the needs of the United 
States. The German-American was 
led not only to conceive a high admira- 
tion for Germany, but at the same time 
a sharp contempt for the country of 
which he was a citizen. The Ameri- 
can of other origin, meanwhile, made 
up his mind that a man who appeared 
to love Germany so much and America 
so little, was open to suspicion of dis- 
loyalty. 

He found in the course of time cer- 
tain evidence which seemed to confirm 
his suspicions. 

54 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 55 

The German-Americans, he found, 
while expressing through their leaders 
the hottest indignation at every in- 
fringement of what they conceived to 
be Germany's rights, by America and 
the Allies, were so far from indignant 
at the infringement of America's rights 
by Germany as actually to demand 
the abject cession of those rights. 
He found, furthermore, that the Ger- 
man-Americans, while exulting in the 
"martial spirit" of their mother coun- 
try, were preaching the most trusting 
and guileless pacifism in this. He 
found that they regarded with con- 
tempt any suggestion of a reorganiza- 
tion of the German government which 
might end in the overthrow of the Ger- 
man "stand-patters," the Junkers; 
even while they were fomenting class^ 
hatred in this country and in count- 
less ways saying and suggesting that 
capitalism was the root of America's 
anti-Germanism. He found that Ger- 
man diplomats or secret agents, 
caught red-handed in some character- 
istic enterprise, were seldom censured. 



56 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

and then only mildly, not so much be- 
cause of their crimes, it seemed, but 
because they had allowed themselves 
to be caught. Americans who spoke 
with fervor and indignation for the de- 
fence of American rights on sea and 
land were, he found, on the other 
hand, excoriated as disturbers of the 
peace. 

The American of other stock than 
German, of whom we here speak, came 
to the only conclusion humanly possi- 
ble under the circumstances. He de- 
cided that the German-American was 
a dangerous fellow and had better be 
watched. 



VII 

TTERE then we have set down the 
A i- grievances which Americans of 
German origin held and in part still 
hold against the American government 
and the American people, and against 
them we have enumerated the causes 
of the mistrust and ill-feeling which 
has set at variance with their German- 
American fellows a large section of 
Americans of other birth or blood. 
Some of us on one side, some on an- 
other felt keenly and still feel keenly 
what we conceive to be the injustice, 
the lack of understanding, the blind 
partisanship of those on the other side. 
Some of us may not be able ever quite 
to forget the bitterness of these three 
years now past. 

But those years are past, that period 
is at an end. We have entered upon 

a new stage with innumerable prob- 

57 



58 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

lems of its own for both the American 
of German origin and the American of 
so-called native stock, to face singly 
and together. They are grave prob- 
lems, but they are not the problems of 
those three years of our inglorious 
"neutrality." Those are behind us, 
those are dead, waiting only for us who 
contended over them once, to bury 
them, shake hands and proceed to- 
gether to a contest of infinitely greater 
import in which we are privileged to 
fight not against each other but side 
by side. 

No American of whatever origin is 
worthy of the name who today seeks 
to cloud the vision of the American 
people and to hamper the fighting 
strength of the American government 
by keeping alive through his silence 
or his speech the bitternesses and sus- 
picions engendered during those years 
now happily behind us. The Ameri- 
can of German origin who keeps his 
grievances warm; the American of 
other origin who, on the evidence of in- 
discretions committed during a period 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 59 

when public opinion among all sec- 
tions of the American people was curi- 
ously adrift, holds today his mistrust, 
— these are equally culpable and de- 
serve equally the sharp condemnation 
of all Americans whose loyalty is more 
than a phrase and whose patriotism is 
more than shouting. 

Never in the history of our country 
which has known civil strife of the 
bitterest kind, has it been more neces- 
sary for the word, ''Come, let us rea- 
son together/' to be spoken by the men 
of force and ideals on both sides of 
the unhappy controversy. Certainly 
our own future domestic peace and 
happiness, and not impossibly the fu- 
ture peace and stability of the world 
may depend on the high-spirited unan- 
imity with which we Americans face 
the task that has been set before us. 

In friendliness, in mutual trust, in 
the common hope of true understand- 
ing and co-operation, Come, let us rea- 
son together. 



VIII 

THE Americans of German origin 
have, with exceptions scarcely 
more numerous or notable than any 
other element in the American people, 
if put to it, can exhibit, dutifully sup- 
ported the United States government. 
Perhaps the majority of the American 
people of other stock than German is 
asking more than it has a right to ask, 
in hoping that this merely "dutiful" 
support may, in spite of a natural, 
sentimental reluctance, as old bitter- 
nesses in the course of time evaporate 
in the solemn consciousness of a com- 
mon peril, develop into a whole- 
hearted advocacy of America's cause. 
Perhaps it is asking too much, and yet, 
to ask it, is only human. To do a 
service because, and only because, 
duty demands it, is much; but it is a 

platitude that service means far more 
60 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 61 

to the giver of it as well as to the one 
to whom it is gi^^en when there is heart 
behind it. 

There was a German -American once 
upon a time whose wife was ill. A 
German cousin, who happened to be 
visiting America at the time, heard of 
her illness and called, leaving a bunch 
of roses. 

"This is very kind of you!" cried 
the German-American appreciatively. 

"Oh, no!" protested his cousin. "It 
was my duty." 

Would he have been puzzled if he 
had seen the dubious and whimsical 
smile with which the German-Ameri- 
can's wife gazed upon the roses? 

The majority of the German-Ameri- 
cans are supporting their government 
from a calm and deliberate sense of 
duty. They are not supporting it with 
any enthusiasm. No fair-minded 
American, of whatever origin he may 
be, will bear them any ill-will for 
that, though he may deeply regret the 
fact. 

For the German-Americans — be it 



62 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

clearly understood — believe, rightly or 
wrongly, that the government of the 
United States made a series of tragic 
mistakes, which in the end led logically 
to what they conceive as the culminat- 
ing mistake of all, America's entrance 
into the World War. Believing this, 
they are nevertheless obediently and 
with open hands supporting this Gov- 
ernment, lending it and giving it their 
gold, lending it — and giving it — their 
sons. 

Let no one underrate the signifi- 
cance of this. The German-Ameri- 
cans, whatever they have said or done 
in the past, whatever they are saying 
or failing to say in the present, have 
stood the fundamental test of demo- 
cratic government. 

They have accepted the will of the 
majority. 

Whether or not they shall ultimately 
go farther than this and support 
whole-heartedly and with fervor a 
cause in which today they disbelieve, 
depends largely on the mental atti- 
tude toward them of their fellow-citi- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 63 

zens of other than German blood and 
the ability of these fellow citizens 
to prove to the German-Americans 
the justice of their cause, the purity of 
their motives and the idealism which 
impels them to dedicate the American 
nation unselfishly to a crusade for the 
liberty of the world. 

No citizen of the United States, see- 
ing clearly a lofty ideal imperilled, 
will fly to arms more quickly or more 
enthusiastically in defence of it than 
the German-American. It is the part 
of other Americans, it is the part of 
the government, to convince him that 
the ideals which they profess have be- 
hind them no national or individual 
vindictiveness toward men of German 
blood merely because they are of Ger- 
man blood, no commercial greed, no 
imperialistic designs, but only a sin- 
cere and lofty resolve to fight and 
sacrifice today for the principles for 
which their fathers fought and sacri- 
ficed before them. 



IX 



THE German-American, we said, 
believed that the United States 
should not have entered the War. On 
what grounds does he base this belief? 
We have already enumerated what 
the German-American regards as cer- 
tain sins of omission and commission 
perpetrated by the national govern- 
ment during the years of our neutral- 
ity. If the United States had from the 
very beginning of the War, he con- 
tends, been firm in its dealings with 
both sets of belligerents, England 
would have been forced to give up her 
"illegal" blockade, Germany would 
consequently never have inaugurated 
her "retaliatory" submarine campaign, 
no American lives would have been 
sacrificed, and we should therefore be 
at peace today. War might have been 
avoided, moreover, he declares, even 

64 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 65 

after permitting England to blockade 
Germany, if the American government 
had placed an embargo on arms and 
ammunition or warned American citi- 
zens not to travel on belligerent ships. 
What the American of other origin re- 
gards as merely the firm assertion and 
defence of American rights toward 
Germany, the German-American re- 
gards as weak-kneed submission to 
England. 

Are the many German-Americans 
who share this opinion possibly right? 

The majority of the American peo- 
ple, and among them a growing num- 
ber who are of German origin, believe 
that these German-Americans are mis- 
taken. Months before the proclama- 
tion of a blockade or a war zone in 
the North Sea by England or a greater 
war zone and submarine campaign by 
Germany, German leaders had in con- 
nection with the invasion of Belgium 
announced and defended a theory of 
"military necessity" which was bound 
sooner or later to lead to conflict with 
the United States on the highway of 



66 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

the world. Many German- Americans, 
moreover, while publicly deferiding 
Germany and all its works, admitted in 
private that her methods in diplomacy 
and in the conduct of war were not al- 
together such as to make attractive the 
prospect of a smashing German vic- 
tory. They accepted President Wil- 
son's suggestion of "Peace without 
victory," therefore, not only because 
they suspected that that was the only 
peace Germany was ever likely to get, 
but also, in many cases, because they 
considered that such a peace would 
chasten the arrogance of the German 
Junker class. 

During the months that followed 
President Wilson's "Peace without 
victory" message to the belligerents, 
the President, his advisers and an in- 
creasing number of the American 
people came gradually to realize two 
important facts. 

One was, that Germany's theory of 
government, and especially her theory 
of a "State morality" entirely inde- 
pendent of all standards of individual 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 67 

morality, was a bar to any possibility 
of a future association of nations for 
the purpose of preventing war; and 
was, furthermore, a constant menace 
to any and every nation which was not 
large enough or not armed enough at 
any instant to defend itself. 

The other was, that Germany was 
winning the war, and undoubtedly 
would win it unless America threw the 
weight of her resources in men and 
money on the side of the Allies. 

Evidence for the first fact appeared 
at that time over the signatures of 
Zimmermann and von Bernstorff, von 
Papen and Boy-Ed, and since that time 
in the cold and murderous spurlos 
versenkt message of Count Luxburg 
and the numerous reports, only a shade 
less repellent, of the same willing tool 
to the same cold-blooded State. 

Evidence for the second fact was 
laid before the American people dur- 
ing the months that intervened between 
December 20th and April 2nd and was 
confirmed in May by Balfour and 
Joffre. 



68 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

During that anxious period from 
December to February when BemstorfF 
went, and from February to April 
when Congress declared war, Presi- 
dent Wilson, doubtlessly with great 
reluctance, rejected his own sugges- 
tion of "peace without victory." A 
drawn battle between the Allies and 
their Teutonic opponents, with the 
United States possibly as guiding spirit 
of the peace negotiations, was one 
thing; a German victory was quite an- 
other, for there was evidence ac- 
cumulating that such a victory meant 
in the near future a war single-handed 
with a stronger Germany, not on our 
own shores, perhaps, but in South 
America in defence of the Monroe 
Doctrine. President Wilson, there- 
fore, decided that the safety of the 
United States, in the first place, and 
in the second, the stability and peace 
of the world, depended on America's 
entrance into the war on the side of 
the Allies. 

When on April 2nd he called upon 
Congress to declare war on Germany 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 69 

in order that America might help "to 
make the world safe for democracy," 
we Americans of German origin op- 
posed him and in part ridiculed him, 
believing that his lofty phrase was a 
hypocritical mantle to cover aims that 
would not bear the blaze of day. In 
the light of later evidence, however, 
we must now admit that, in so speak- 
ing, the President was in seven memor- 
able words, not only expressing 
America's international obligation as 
the greatest of republics, but also, at 
the same time, laying, as the essential 
foundation stone of any future 
association of nations, the principle 
of democracy on which we German- 
Americans and Americans of all other 
breeds unreservedly pin our faith. 
In one bold, imaginative phrase he 
not only called upon the American 
people to uphold for themselves and 
for all free peoples their ideals of 
liberty and popular government 
against a cold-blooded State which 
considered itself above human stand- 
ards of conduct and morality; but, by 



70 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

inevitable inference, also served 
notice upon the nations at whose 
side he was about to set the United 
States, and, no less, upon the despots 
and Junkers among our own people, 
that the price which the American 
government demanded for rescuing 
the Allies of western Europe from the 
dominance of Germany, and, inci- 
dentally, their financial backers in 
America from bankruptcy, was the 
extension after the war of democratic 
rule not only in Germany but in the 
countries of the Allies and within the 
United States. 

If, as a large number of German- 
Americans believe, our own Junkers 
of Wall Street forced America into 
the War, these would-be autocrats of 
ours have been hoist by their own 
petard, for their powers and their 
money are already being taken from 
them. 

If, on the other hand, as a still 
larger number of German-Americans 
assert, England forced us into the War, 
she has in the process cut off her own 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 71 

nose. For it is becoming increasingly 
clear that the victory which will end 
this war in the only way that the free 
peoples of the world will allow it to 
end, will be not an English victory, 
but an American victory. In fact, 
there is a prospect of grave danger in 
the possibility that England may 
realize this too vividly for her own 
comfort and consent to a patched-up 
peace, based on German renunciations 
in the West, before America can make 
her power overwhelmingly felt. 

Has not the time come for every 
Gesang Verein from, Maine to Cali- 
fornia to stand and sing in unison, 
"JFer andern eine Grube grdbt, fdllt 
selbst hinein?" — and thereafter to 
unite in singing with a fervor never 
felt before, "My country, 'tis of thee?" 

We begin to think so. 



THE writer of these pages is one 
of many German-Americans who 
believed, until a short time ago, that 
the phrase "to make the world safe for 
democracy" was, frankly, hypocritical 
cant, a kind of glimmering gold dust 
to throw in the eyes of the crowd. He 
thought that the United States had gone 
to war solely on the submarine issue 
and he did not quite see why, if it was 
necessary to go to war on that issue in 
April, 1917, it was not even more 
pressingly necessary to go to war on it 
two years earlier, while the horrors of 
the sinking of the Lusitania were still 
fresh in our hearts. The same objec- 
tion, for that matter, might be made to 
the phrase "to make the world safe for 
democracy" as a basis for our tardy 
entry into the war. The world was 

more unsafe for democracy in August 

72 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 73 

and September 1914 than it has ever 
been since. 

Why then did we not jump into the 
struggle at that time? 

The answer is, that only a small 
minority of Americans, who seemed to 
the rest of us at the time the wildest 
kind of anti-German fanatics, recog- 
nized in 1914 the fact which the Amer- 
ican people is only how beginning to 
recognize and which President Wilson 
expressed in so vivid and memorable 
a phrase, namely, that on the battle- 
fields of Europe today a highly scien- 
tific and brilliantly organized form of 
autocracy is battling to dominate the 
far less scientific, far less efficient, far 
less skilfully organized democracies 
of the world. Only a very few 
Americans recognized the real char- 
acter of the conflict in the first or even 
the second year of the war. To the 
great majority it seemed at bottom an 
economic struggle, a war for trade 
routes, for commercial dominance, a 
war in which France, Belgium and 
Serbia, even Russia and Austria, were 



74 where; do you stand? 

the dupes and pawns of the world's 
greatest trade rivals, Germany and 
England. 

We might still be believing that, for 
we are remote from Europe in more 
senses than one, and we do not credit 
all which garrulous travellers from 
those distant parts seek to tell us, for 
our own good. It was not England or 
English propaganda; it was not 
France, it was not Belgium, which 
told us, after many inventions, the 
"real truth about the War." 

It was Germany. 

It was not through any propaganda, 
moreover, that she told us; not through 
silver-tongued orators, nor writers of 
editorials. Germany told us the truth 
about the war not by the medium of 
words at all but by her own avowed 
and defended deeds. She told it to 
us with terrifying frankness when she 
sank the Lusitania, not in sinking her 
(which was absolutely permissible 
under international law and the laws 
of reasonable self-defence) but in 
sinking her without warning and with- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 75 

out making provisions for the rescue 
of her passengers. She told us in the 
sinking of the Arabic, the Ancona, the 
Sussex, in the dynamiting of bridges 
and munition plants, in the revelations 
of her diplomatic correspondence. 
Presenting evidence which no "Eng- 
lish propaganda" could ever make 
half as convincing as she made it her- 
self by the defence of her own states- 
men and leaders of opinion, Germany 
told us, indeed, the truth about the 
war. 

That truth was, that a people who 
considered themselves "the centre of 
God's plan for the world" (Pastor W. 
Lehmann) and believed themselves 
hated and pursued by other nations 
(in the words of another of their in- 
tellectual leaders. Professor Sombart) 
only because of their "enormous 
spiritual superiority" as "the repre- 
sentatives of God on earth," had 
allowed a system of political morality 
to develop among their ruling classes 
which made utterly precarious the 
existence of any nation which was not 



76 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

at all times highly organized for de- 
fence and which, by reason of its more 
popular and therefore less centralized 
form of government, could not, with- 
out sacrificing its ideals, be so or- 
ganized. 

It was Germany herself who told 
us and who proved to us beyond ques- 
tion that the Great War was not merely 
a conflict between trade rivals, but 
a war between autocracy, scientific, 
efficient but conscienceless, on the one 
hand; and on the other, democracy, 
blundering, inefficient and in detail 
corrupt, but in the main progressive 
and sensitive to the opinions of men. 

It was Germany herself who made 
this clear to us. It was Germany 
praising (a little too loudly we 
thought) her own point of view, 
her own spirit of sacrifice, self-dis- 
cipline, self-abnegation; it was Ger- 
many praising above all things, war 
and the grandiose conception of the 
German State as the self-appointed 
health-officer of the world testing out 
who, under the laws of biology, was 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 77 

among the nations fit to survive; it 
was Germany, showing us by her ac- 
tions, that she was true to the 
philosophy she preached, who made 
us remember our own notions of life 
and government, and made us as a 
people see them and feel them as we 
had not seen them and felt them for 
half a century. 

It was Germany like a schoolmaster \ 
drumming into our heads night and 
day her supreme belief in Force, who 
made us remember that our faith as 
a people rested on Justice. 

It was Germany, showing us the 
effects, physical and psychological, 
within and without, of autocratic, 
paternal government, which made us 
decide that democracy was worth 
preserving even at the cost of all we 
possessed of treasure and youth. 



XI 



IVTE say that this is a war be- 
VV tween autocracy and democ- 
racy. That is one of those glittering 
generalities which are always open 
to. suspicion. But, whereas most 
slogans of the sort are superficially 
true and fundamentally false, this 
slogan is at bottom sound and untrue 
only on the surface. 

Germany is assuredly not in form 
an autocracy, as Russia, before the 
days of the Duma was an autocracy; 
that is, an empire ruled by an absolute 
monarch responsible only to himself 
and God, and not very responsible to 
God. William the Second, as King 
of Prussia, is, theoretically, limited 
in his control by an Upper House and 
a House of Representatives; as Ger- 
man Emperor, he is president of a 

confederation of some twenty-odd 
78 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 79 

states, whose representatives constitute 
the Bundesrat or Federal Council, 
which is theoretically an associate 
House of the Reichstag, the popular 
assembly. 

All the machinery of a constitu- 
tional and democratic monarchy like 
England, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Den- 
mark, Holland, Greece, is present in 
Germany, and it operates smoothly 
and is a pleasure to the eye. Where- 
in then does the government of Ger- 
many differ so vitally from the gov- 
ernment of these other nations, that we 
presume to call Germany, which is 
ruled by a monarch, an autocracy, and 
these other countries, which are like- 
wise ruled by monarchs, to all intents 
and purposes, democracies? 

Is this sheer hypocritical cant? Let 
us see. 

In England, the actual government 
is under the direction of a Prime 
Minister appointed ostensibly by the 
King, but responsible to Parliament 
and only to Parliament, which can, in 
the American meaning of the word, 



80 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

"recall" him at any moment and with 
no greater effort than it takes to record 
a parliamentary vote. As soon as 
the Prime Minister loses his majority 
in Parliament, he automatically loses 
his position, which, thereupon, de- 
scends on the leader of the Opposi- 
tion. The King may not desire this 
change of administration. Person- 
ally, he may in fact violently object 
to it, but his opinion on the matter, 
though more interesting, is actually 
no more important in influencing the 
course of events than the opinion of 
the postmaster of Ballachulish. The 
King "regrets" to accept the resigna- 
tion of Lord So-and-So, and takes 
pleasure in graciously requesting Mr. 
Other-and-So to form a new Cabinet; 
and the government goes on and the 
majority, somewhat differently con- 
stituted, continues to rule. In its es- 
sence, that is democracy; for the 
people, through their representatives 
in Parliament, at all times have con- 
trol of those who govern them, with 
a power which we in America lack, 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 81 

of changing their government at any 
moment when their governors cease to 
represent the views of the majority of 
the people as represented in the House 
of Commons. 

In Germany, on the other hand, the 
Prime Minister, or Imperial Chan- 
cellor, though appointed also by the 
monarch, is responsible not to parlia- 
ment at all, but only to the master who 
appoints him. Neither the Federal 
Council nor the Reichstag are officially 
consulted in his selection or have 
power to veto it. He is set in his 
place by the arbitrary will> and whim 
of the sovereign, subject only to the 
sovereign's political sagacity and re- 
spect for public opinion, and he holds 
his place as long and only as long 
as his master is satisfied with his work. 
The Reichstag may rail and tear its 
hair; it makes no difference. The 
Emperor appoints him and only the 
Emperor can remove him. 

The Reichstag, furthermore, is im- 
potent, not only in the appointment 
and removal of the Chancellor, but 



82 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

also largely in the matter of legisla- 
tion. Most legislation originates in 
the Federal Council which represents 
solely the rulers of the twenty-six 
federated states; but whether it 
originates there or in the Reichstag, 
all legislation is subject to this 
Council's consent. This Council, 
moreover, is not merely a body of 
aristocrats like the House of Lords 
(many of whom, incidentally, were 
commoners yesterday with a com- 
moner's point of view) ; its members 
ostensibly represent the governments 
of the federated states, but, being not 
elective but appointive, they are to all 
intents and purposes the representa- 
tives not of the peoples of the states 
from which they come but of certain 
kings, dukes and princes almost all of 
whom are either members of the House 
of Hohenzollern or connected with it 
by marriage. The Grand Duke of 
Baden, for instance, is the Emperor's 
first cousin; the Duke of Schles- 
wig-Holstein is his brother-in-law; the 
Grand Duke of Oldenburg is the fa- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 83 

ther-in-law of one of his sons; the 
Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonder- 
burg-Gliicksburg the father-in-law of 
another; the Grand Duke of Mecklen- 
burg-Schwerin is the brother-in-law of 
a third; the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen 
the brother-in-law of a fourth; the 
Duke of Brunswick is the husband of 
his only daughter; the Prince of 
Schaumburg-Lippe, the husband of 
one of his sisters; the Duke of Saxe- 
Meiningen the husband of another; 
and so forth and so on. It is quite a 
family affair. All of these dukes, 
princes and princesses hold actual or 
honorary commissions under him, as 
Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian 
army. When one considers, more- 
over, that the great families of Ger- 
many, and especially the royal or 
semi-royal families, are absolutely 
subject to the autocratic rule of the 
head of the house — the composition of 
the Federal Council becomes signifi- 
cant. 

That Council controls the Reichs- 
tag, inasmuch as it has the power to 



84 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

nullify its actions; it is in turn con- 
trolled by the House of Hohenzollern 
which is under the absolute and un- 
questioned dominance of the Emperor. 
The Emperor is supported by the 
Prussian army, the imperial navy and 
by thousands of Prussian and im- 
perial administrative or judicial 
office-holders, professors and school 
teachers who hold their positions at 
his pleasure. The Emperor who, 
quite apart from family influence, 
as King of Prussia controls seventeen 
out of the Council's sixty-one votes, 
can declare offensive war with the 
consent of the Federal Council, with- 
out consulting the Reichstag; he may 
declare what he in his own unsup- 
ported judgment may consider defen- 
sive war, as in 1914, without the con- 
sent of either body. In the waging of 
war, the Reichstag enters only as that 
branch of the government which votes 
the necessary credits; and even here 
it has power only to annoy, not to con- 
trol the executive. For if it withholds 
the credits, the Kaiser can dissolve the 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 85 

Reichstag and create a military 
dictatorship, a move which the Pan- 
Germans have frequently advocated. 
Conditions in Germany are therefore 
exactly the reverse of what they are 
in England. For in Germany it is 
not the monarch but the Reichstag 
which is the decoration, playing to 
some extent the amiable part which 
the King plays in England — its views, 
that is, are always highly interesting, 
but in a pinch, of no influence what- 
ever in the actual conduct of affairs. 
The Reichstag is in many instances, as 
an editorial in the Frankfurter Zei- 
tung pointed out as recently as Jan- 
uary first of this year, "a mere debat- 
ing club," wildly waving its arms 
while the Federal Council with the 
Chancellor at its head, and ultimately 
the Emperor himself, supported by the 
Great General Staff", make the deci- 
sions against which the people have no 
appeal. 

Efficient though it may be, benevo- 
lent though it may be, surely this is 
autocracy. 



86 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

The German government is a gov- 
ernment by experts. From the 
Emperor, trained from childhood 
for his place, down to the young- 
est Referendar, or judge's secretary, 
and including governors of provinces 
and districts, diplomats, consuls, 
mayors, judges, police superintend- 
ents, health officers, all are experts, 
each in his own field. The result is 
marvellous efficiency, but it is ef- 
ficiency bought at the price of that 
liberty, equality, fraternity, which we 
Americans cherish as the fundamental 
blessings of democracy. 

For suffrage in Germany and espe- 
cially in Prussia, the dominant state in 
the Empire, is based on property, so 
that a single rich man may and does, 
here and there, hold in himself one- 
third the voting power of a district; 
and the four percent of the rich and 
the fourteen percent of the well-to-do 
have as much representation in the 
Prussian Landtag as the eighty-two 
percent of the poor. The election of 
deputies to the Reichstag is not thus 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 87 

circumscribed, indeed, but the ballot- 
ing is open, not, as in the United 
States, secret. Voters can, therefore, 
be controlled by their employers by 
the mere threat of discharge. Surely 
such a system is a very mockery of 
any conception of liberty and of 
equality. 

The German system, indeed, is 
based on the denial of equality. To 
the mind of the German State, there 
are two hereditaiy classes, the gov- 
ernors and the governed, separated 
by the twin bars of social caste and 
the possession of wealth. A man is 
born to be a governor or he is born 
to be governed. There is, in a sense, 
no escaping either fate, for the son 
of a count must be feeble-minded, in- 
deed, who cannot secure a commission 
in a crack regiment; and the son of 
a laborer can no more hope to rise 
to a position in the higher government 
service than he can hope to become a 
lieutenant in the Prussian Guards. 
Social distinctions are sharp and abso- 
lute and rest in family plus wealth. 



88 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

In the government service, itself, the 
administrative branch is open only to 
men of family who have a certain 
amount of money with which to enter- 
tain in a fashion worthy of the prestige 
of a Prussian official. The judicial 
branch holds, socially, a distinctly 
inferior position. 

There was once upon a time (and 
this is a true story) a certain rich 
and ambitious lady with a marriage- 
able daughter. A young Prussian 
official of her own social caste wooed 
her daughter and won her. 

"I like him so much," she said of 
her prospective son-in-law. "And 
isn't it just splendid that he is in the 
administrative and not the judicial 
branch? Because naturally if he 
were in the judicial branch I could not 
give him my daughter." 

The whole educational system is 
organized, financed and controlled in 
a manner unmistakably intended to 
make ever wider the gap between the 
sons of the small governing class and 
the sons of the class, eight or ten 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 89 

times as great, which is governed. 
The sons of the nobility, the 
aristocracy, the upper middle <?lass 
and a very few of the lower middle 
class who have money, go to the 
Gymnasia, the Kadettenschulen and 
similar institutions, and to the educa- 
tion of this tenth of the nation's youth, 
the Prussian government devotes 
nearly one quarter of its total educa- 
tional appropriation. On the child in 
the Volkschule (which corresponds to 
the American public school), the gov- 
ernment expends 65 marks annually 
(a matter of sixteen dollars at the 
normal rate of exchange). On the 
child in the middle schools, it expends 
112 marks; on the child in the higher 
schools, 248 marks. The average 
size of a class in the Volkschule is 
55 pupils per teacher. In the United 
States, 40 has been found too great a 
number for efficient instruction and 
the average over this country is 33. 

"Many of the most illustrious 
teachers of Germany," writes Win- 
throp Talbot in a recent article in the 



90 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

Century, prefaced and endorsed by 
Professor John Dewey, "have main- 
tained, observant of imperial expres- 
sions and policies, that the state is best 
subserved by keeping the bulk of the 
people in a stunted state of mental 
starvation for unthinking toil and that 
the work of the world cannot be done 
without a large degree of existing 
near-illiteracy; and for this reason 
they have opposed strenuously the 
policy of generous public expenditure 
for popular education." 

Wherefore, the machinery of gov- 
ernment continues to run smoothly, 
unhampered by the rude injection of 
wrenches thrown by an awakening 
populace; and still, as Prince Max of 
Baden bitterly cried in the upper 
chamber of that state recently, "The 
majority of Germans indolently accept 
the authorities without any desire on 
their part to share in responsibility for 
the welfare of the Fatherland." 

No liberty to rise, no equality in 
education or the conduct of govern- 
ment, no fraternity whatsoever be- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 91 

tween the governing classes and the 
classes governed — what fools Ger- 
many's silver-tongued defenders have 
sought to make of us when they de- 
clared that Germany was as demo- 
cratic a nation as ours! They thought 
we did not know anything about Ger- 
many. And they were right. 

But we are learning. 

"Germany has changed during these 
years of war," her friends declare. 
"The war has been a great leveller. 
Class distinctions have vanished." 

Let us see. 

From the heart of Germany itself 
comes the illuminating word. "Truly, 
there is need these days of the intelli- 
gence not only of the middle class but 
of the proletariat," writes a prominent 
German scientist satirically. "But 
what are you going to do, when peace 
comes, with a man Vho himself ad- 
mits that his father was a stone-mason's 
assistant'? Since the subalterns who 
are doing commissioned officers' duty, 
popular as they are, do not of them- 
selves have adequate authority, the 



92 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

government has created the temporary 
makeshift of subaltern-lieutenants to 
be considered equals at officers^ mess 
only at the fighting front/' 

So much for Germany's democracy. 

This is not the place to ask the ques- 
tion whether Germany's conception of 
government by experts may not, after 
all, be the right conception; and ours 
may not, for all our boasts, be wrong. 
For truly, Germany is well-governed, 
benevolently, efficiently and, as far as 
dollar-corruption goes, honestly gov- 
erned. Its poor and sick are cared 
for, its laborers and its aged are pro- 
tected. And our democratic govern- 
ment is inefficient, corrupt, incorrigi- 
bly short-sighted, and always wasteful, 
beyond imagining, of money and of 
time. 

And yet — 

It is not cant to say that in America 
all have an equal chance to rise, 
through education free and equal for 
all, from the lowest to the highest 
place. It is not cant to say that the 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 93 

classes of governors and governed in 
this country are made up not of those 
to whom, on the one hand, opportu- 
nity is given, and, on the other hand, 
those from whom opportunity is con- 
sciously withheld; but of those, rich 
and poor, who take the opportunity 
held out equally to all, and those who 
refuse to take it. It is not cant to say^ 
that the vote of the poor man is as \ 
powerful as the vote of the rich. 

It is the simple truth, and it means 
that, with all our countless faults and 
stupidities and petty and great cor- 
ruptions, our feet are set on th.e road 
to that ideal whose motto, is: Thou 
shah love iky neighbor as thyself. 



XII 

HERE we Americans of German 
blood stand, confronting, on the 
one hand, the country of our origin, 
highly organized and admirable to the 
eye, yet materialistic and (if we may 
believe her own Bernstorffs and Lux- 
burgs) coldly corrupt at heart; and, 
on the other, the country of our adop- 
tion, so childish, so optimistic, so 
money-grubbing and yet at bottom so 
idealistic, somehow so grand! 

We stand between two masters. 
We cannot serve them both, not even 
in the undisturbed silence of our own 
hearts. For the ideal which Ger- 
many represents is so utterly removed 
from the ideal which America is, in 
her blundering way, seeking after, 
that no one who cleaves to the one can 
for an instant hold to the other. 

Here no neutrality is possible. 

94 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 95 

Do we believe in paternal govern- 
ment by experts, with the inequality 
and the concentration of power in a 
few possibly efficient but irresponsible 
hands, that inevitably go with such a 
form of government? 

Or— 

Do we believe in democratic gov- 
ernment which, with all its sins and 
shortcomings on its head, does make 
for equality and does call upon each 
individual rich and poor, to develop, 
for his own good and for the good of 
all, whatever talents he may possess? 

We men and women of German 
blood must understand clearly the 
issues that are involved and, facing 
them, must take our choice. For it 
is not only that America, counting 
heads and hearts, must know unmis- 
takably who is heart and soul for her, 
and who is for her only as a matter of 
convenience* while in the depths of his 
being he holds to the principles of 
the enemy. It is rather this — ^that 
America in this great crisis needs on 
her side the passionate idealism of 



96 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

that old German spirit which has been 
educated out of the German citizen 
of today and survives in its old force 
only here where it has found the free 
and congenial air denied it among the 
hills and woods of its birth. 

The forefathers of many of us were 
Forty-eighters. They rebelled in 
Prussia, in Saxony, in Hanover, 
in Bavaria, Baden, Wiirtenberg, 
Austria, Hungary, against an auto- 
cratic form of government which, in 
the seventy years which have since 
elapsed, has grown powerful beyond 
the fears even of those who in 1848 
gave their lives to overthrow it. Those 
fathers and grandfathers of ours 
failed, beaten down even in cities not 
under Prussian rule, by Prussian 
troops. Not the autocracy, but they 
were crushed. They fled, some from 
prison with the death penalty on their 
heads, to England, where the poets 
Kinkel and Freiligrath among others, 
found sympathetic refuge; the ma- 
jority to America. 

What these magnificent revolution- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 97 

ists stood for and accomplished over 
here is history, and the greatest of 
them, Carl Schurz, will always remain 
one of the noblest, as he was one of 
the most striking and picturesque, 
political figures of his time. 

Confronted with the choice between 
autocracy and democracy, those men, 
in the bitter conflicts of 1848 and 
1849, chose rather to shed the blood 
of their own fellow-citizens, as Ameri- 
cans in 1776 had chosen rather to shed 
the blood of their own kin, than to 
leave undefended against the forces of 
reaction the principles of popular gov- 
ernment in which they believed. 

It is no new problem that we are 
asked to face. It is in a sense not 
even a new war in which we are asked 
to take sides. It is for us the con- 
tinuation of the war begun by our 
fathers for the democratization of the 
governments of the world. It is for 
us the opportunity to carry to fulfil- 
ment their holiest dreams. 

And not only their dreams, not only 
the dreams of those brave men long 



98 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

dead; but the dreams of the noble 
minds of Germany today which, amid 
the orgy of materialism, have been 
able to keep the lights of the spirit 
burning. As the German dreamers of 
the past looked to America for inspira- 
tion, so the dreamers of today look to 
her to lead the world toward a new and 
wider conception of patriotism than 
the patriotism to a dynasty or a single 
narrow, jealous, self-conscious State. 
A German professor of physiology 
at the University of Berlin, Dr. Nico- 
lay, dared to express his dream of such 
a wider patriotism, and was impris- 
oned in the fortress of Graudenz for 
his presumption. "That new patriot- 
ism is already a living thing beyond 
the water," he cries. "Over there it 
could come to birth because there the 
dynastic patriotism of the past has be- 
come transformed into a true patriot- 
ism to an ideal. The new Europe has 
already been bom, not indeed in Eu- 
rope, but over there where there are no 
ruined castles and no mediaeval junk 
and tomfoolery. The new Europe has 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 99 

been bom. Let it be the care of us 
Europeans who remain that it become 
a living thing on our old soil likewise, 
in order that civilization be not lost to 
us for ever in favor of America." 

It is thus that a German professor 
at Germany's greatest university sees 
the contrast between the country of our 
fathers and the country of which we 
today are citizens. Not Germany, he 
declares, but America is the torch- 
bearer of civilization, because here has 
already transpired what must transpire 
in Europe during the coming genera- 
tions if European civilization is to en- 
dure — the breaking down of barriers 
of race and language and origin, the 
wholesale burial of hatchets in the 
clear light of a great ideal of liberty >^ 
shared by all alike. 

The German dreamer in prison sees 
in the working of the American melt- 
ing-pot the hope of enduring peace for 
Europe; even as the German laborer, 
rioting in the streets of Breslau or 
Berlin, sees in the equality of educa- 
tion and franchise, which the Ameri- 



100 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

can enjoys, the hope of economic in- 
dependence, and a greater opportunity 
for his children. 

If the dreamer in Germany is will- 
ing to go to prison for the sake of 
preaching American ideals, and the 
laborer in Germany is willing to fling 
himself against the bayonets of the 
police for them, can we Americans of 
German blood, who live and prosper 
under a government based on those 
ideals, do less than give that govern- 
ment our open, ungrudging and enthu- 
siastic declaration of support? 



XIII 

WHERE do you stand? 
Where can we, Americans of 
German origin, with our Muhlenberg 
and Herkimer, who fought for liberty 
in the American Revolution, with our 
Sigel, Blenker, Hecker, Osterhaus, 
Carl Schurz and their comrades who 
fought for liberty first in Germany, 
and, failing there, fought for liberty 
under the banner of Abraham Lin- 
coln, where can we stand, in justice to 
our high tradition, except heart and 
soul with those who today fight for lib- 
erty against the identical system and 
the identical dynasty against which 
our fathers fought two generations 
ago? 

Not only loyalty to the government 
to which we owe allegiance, but 
loyalty to the spirit and the high tradi- 
tions of our German revolutionary 

101 



102 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

heroes, demand that today we stand 
unmistakably with and for America. 

Surely, the great majority of 
Americans of German origin do so 
stand. 

Why then do they still refuse 
frankly and freely to admit it? Why 
do they still permit the shadow of past 
misunderstandings to loom between 
them and the rest of the American 
people? Why do they still permit 
any one to fear that they stand for and 
behind Germany? 

Their reluctance is perhaps some- 
what a matter of pride, somewhat a 
matter of resentment; but most of all 
it is a matter of sentiment. 

We German-Americans are, many 
of us, prisoners of an illusion, tied 
hand and foot by sentimentalities. 
Only a number altogether negligible 
would ever want to take up arms for 
Germany. The majority are fully 
conscious that they belong to America, 
that their future and the future of 
their children lie here. But senti- 
ments tie our hands behind our backs; 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 103 

and they are not even valid sentiments. 
The Germany to which our hearts now 
turn in sympathy is not the Germany 
we actually know — hard, materialistic 
and brutally bent on achieving, pre- 
serving and exercising power — but a 
tender land of green valleys and 
sleepy towns, of castle ruins and cosy 
taverns in their shadow — (ah, to the 
writer of these pages, too, there is 
magic in those dear names, Drachen- 
fels, Riidesheim, Assmannshausen, 
Lahneck, Rolandseck, Schloss Hard- 
enberg, Plesse, Gleichen, Hanstein, 
Yburg!) — of singing and fiddle play- 
ing and dancing in the woods and 
coffee parties and hilarious excursions 
and summer walking-trips along the 
Rhine and through the Black Forest, 
and in it and through it all, the 
"Trompeter von Sakkingen" school 
of sentimental romance and the gay 
tenderness of Eichendorff's "Tauge- 
nichts." It is to this picture-book 
Germany that our minds return. In- 
stead of contrasting German actuality 
with American actuality, we contrast 



104 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

this dream-Germany with workaday 
America ; and against so rosy a dream, 
America, however hospitable, however 
helpful, seems alien and unkind; and 
liberty, equality and the possibility of 
fraternity are altogether forgotten. 

We German-Americans are fettered 
with illusions. "Germany gave us so 
much," we say. "How can we turn 
against her?" When we say that we 
forget that, once upon a time, we or 
our fathers somewhere in Germany 
weighed thoughtfully the benefits of 
German life and the probable benefits 
of American life, weighed the Gemilt- 
lichkeit, the charm, the consciousness 
of "being home" among friends, 
against the greater freedom, the 
greater opportunity that the distant 
shore seemed to promise; and chose 
to leave the old home and seek the 
distant shore. What America offered 
seemed then of greater value than 
what Germany offered. Our fathers 
came to America and were evidently 
not disappointed, for they remained. 
They recognized that what America 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 105 

gave was to them of greater value 
than what Germany could give them. 
"Germany gave us so much. How 
can we turn against her?" Our 
fathers turned against her years ago 
for reasons which then seemed just. 
They wanted the benefits which life 
in America promised. They secured 
them and enjoyed them; and we, their 
sons, in our time are enjoying them. 
Now like a child that has paid a nickel 
for a toy, we are crying because the 
salesman will not let us have the toy 
and the nickel also. 

We German-Americans are prison- 
ers of an illusion. "Germany gave us 
so much," we say. True, Germany 
did give us much. Germany gave us 
charming customs, such as birthday 
and Christmas celebrations; Germany 
gave us a love for poetry, for music; 
she gave us a keen sense of duty, of 
self-discipline, of integrity in busi- 
ness, of family loyalty. But the 
qualities of character which she gave 
are not exclusively German qualities. 
There are cannibals in the interior of 



106 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

South America who would rather die 
than break a promise. The other 
gifts, moreover, especially the gift of 
a beautiful language and a beautiful 
literature — what have we done with 
those? 

"Germany gave us so much." 
When we say that, we speak of the 
language, the poetry. And here 
again we are deceiving ourselves, 
we are sentimentalizing. For how 
have we German-Americans actually 
cherished the German language in the 
generations during which we were al- 
lowed to cultivate it without opposi- 
tion? Did we cling to it because we 
loved it for its own sake and the sake 
of the Fatherland? A few among the 
educated have actually clung to it and 
held it high for reasons of sentiment. 
The majority, however, used it be- 
cause at first it was easier to speak 
German than to learn English. After 
a while they found it was easier to 
use here and there an English word 
or American localism heard a hundred 
times a day, than to bother to find 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 107 

its exact German equivalent. Then, 
soon, they were talking the bastard 
lingo in which the classic example, 
"die cow iss eeber die fence gechumpt 
and hat die kebbedges gedamaged, 
only slightly exaggerates the awful 
corruption of both tongues. Surely, 
people who allow themselves or their 
children to talk a hodge-podge of that 
sort cannot be said to be cherishing 
the spiritual heritage of the Father- 
land. 

We German-Americans have not 
cherished it. We are merely trying 
to fool ourselves into believing that we 
have cherished it or still cherish it. 
The object of the various associations 
of German-Americans was ostensibly 
to keep fresh the memory of the Ger- 
man language and culture. What 
they actually did keep fresh were cer- 
tain German customs and a somewhat 
maudlin homesickness for a dream- 
Germany. They encouraged the pre- 
tence that German-Americans were 
exiles, and frequently on festive occa- 
sions we have pleasantly recalled our 



108 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

hard lot and pleasantly forgotten it 
the morning after and gone about our 
business. 

Germans are naturally sentimental. 
They are never so happy as when they 
are sad, and it is notorious that when 
they are having the gayest time, they 
sing 

^'Ich weiss nicht was soil es hedeuten 
Dass ich so traurig bin." 

It is natural-born sentimentality 
which has tied the German-American 
to a Fatherland which he left for 
excellent reasons and to which he has 
given no practical attention since. 
Like all sentimentalists, he wants to 
have his cake and eat it, too; he for- 
swears his allegiance to Germany be- 
cause he wants to enjoy American 
equality of opportunity for himself 
and for his children, and at the same 
time he persuades himself that he is 
still ein guter braver Deutscher, 
America is his wife, but he keeps 
Germany as his soul-mate, and is 
puzzled and offended when his wife 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 109 

boxes his ears, and hales him into 
court and asks, 

'^Heinrich, where do you stand ?'^ 
Sentimentality has kept the Ger- 
man-American the man-without-a- 
country that today he appears to the 
majority of his fellow-citizens to be. 
America should have been more ob- 
servant. She should have seen that 
we German-Americans needed some 
friendly attention. America did not 
see, but Germany did. Germany — 
far-sighted, keen for openings — 
played on the German-American's 
sentimentality in every way she knew. 
She sent silver-tongued orators to 
thrill us; she sent ponderous pro- 
fessors to give our banquet-dreams a 
pseudo-intellectual basis; she sent se- 
cret agents; she sent organizers. She 
hinted strongly that there was an Order 
of the Red Eagle or an Order of the 
Crown waiting for the German-Ameri- 
can who loyally served Germany's 
cause; she whispered in the ears of 
editors dark secrets concerning anti- 
German persecutions, Anglo-Saxon 



110 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

presumption and similar "nativist" 
hobgoblins. 

It was a long skilful cast; the 
imitation butterfly beautifully con- 
cealed the hook; and we German- 
Americans bit. 

Indeed, the German-American is 
the victim of an illusion. He has 
allowed himself to believe, and he has 
been cruelly led to believe that he was 
a most particular kind of fish, at home 
in two elements, the water and the 
air. He has been led to think that 
he is exempt from that law, which is 
not only biblical, that no man can 
serve two masters. He has been told 
that he must serve two masters. 

An illusion has tied the German- 
American hand and foot. That illu- 
sion is the sentimental idea that there 
is such a thing as loyalty of the emo- 
tions separate and apart from lo};alty 
of the hands, a loyalty which may 
safely be given to Germany without 
disturbing in any degree the loyalty 
of the hands which is due the United 
States. 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? Ill 

That notion is false and pernicious! 
The German language itself has the 
only adequate word for it. It is 
Bloedsinn, 

No man can serve two masters; for 
either he will hate the one, and love 
the other; or else he ivill hold to the 
one and despise the other. 

No American of German blood can 
in this crisis cleave with his heart to 
Germany and be anything but disloyal 
to the United States. 



XIV 

1V7^ are men of flesh and bone, but 
VV we are, first of all and above 
all, beings of spirit and lire who give 
their allegiance not as body and blood 
dictate but as the discriminating mind 
commands. Germany is indeed the 
parent of our bodies, but America is 
the father and guardian of our liber- 
ated spirits. America, who gives to 
each one of us the patient teaching he 
is wise enough to ask for and accept; 
who reaches down to us of herself no 
benefits, but allows one and all 
equally to strive for and achieve, 
each according to his power, the bless- 
ings of life as he sees them; who 
gives us no government but that which 
we ourselves make for ourselves — 
chaos, if we so wish, order if we so 
desire; who sets no limit to the possi- 
bilities of our lives save the limits of 

112 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 113 

nature and our own wisdom and will! 

Americans of German blood, our 
place is here! Here is the home to 
which henceforth body and mind, 
spirit and heart belong! This is the 
air in which, as nowhere else, that 
which is highest in us can breathe and 
live! 

A German poet, Gottfried Keller, 
who truly loved German woods and 
hills, wrote many years ago of that 
love of the homeland which under cir- 
cumstances becomes a fetter and 
makes men "who should have put be- 
hind them childish things, trifle with 
puerile toys," made ridiculous by the 
crafty tyranny of sentiment. 

"Hier trenne sich der lang vereinte Strom! 
Versiegend schwinde der im alten Staube, 
Der andere breche sich ein neues Bette! 
Denn eineji Pontifex nur fasst der Dom, 
Das ist die Freiheit, der polit'sche Glaube, 
Der lost und bindet jede Seelenkette ! " 

Here is our home. Indeed, we have 
no other home. If in our momentary 
passion and under the influence of an 
illusion, we stand aside now, saying 



114 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

to the rest of the American people, 
"We will do our duty. We will help 
you with our hands and our treasure, 
iDUt remember our hearts are not with 
you"; if we say that, we are lost; we 
will be homeless wanderers on the 
face of the earth. 

For Germany will give us no refuge. 
In Germany today no one is hated and 
despised as we German-Americans. 
For Germany is saying, "These folk 
who call themselves Germans and 
call themselves Americans have 
proved themselves neither one nor the 
other. They have neither helped the 
country of their origin nor the coun- 
try of their adoption. In a war such 
as this, they have been content to be 
neither hot nor cold. God have pity 
on their souls! We will not." 

The German Emperor himself years 
ago spoke the final word concerning 
divided allegiance: "German-Ameri- 
cans? I recognize no German- Ameri- 
cans. I recognize only Germans or 
Americans." 

This is a grave hour for us Ameri- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 115 

cans of German blood. Shall we, in 
future, be jeered and shunned as 
renegades both in Germany and in 
America? Shall it be said of us, the 
world over, that, faced by the great- 
est issue of modem times, we were so 
tied to dreams and resentments that 
we were unable firmly and unmistak- 
ably to range ourselves with those who 
were fighting for the ideals for which 
our fathers fought and suffered? 
Shall this be said of us? 

The time has come to forget griev- 
ances. Some among us Americans of 
German blood believe that, in the heat 
of bitter controversies, they have been 
wronged. But we ourselves have not 
all been guiltless. For the sake of a 
great ideal in peril, but if not for that, 
then for the sake of our own future 
peace and happiness and the peace 
and happiness of our children, it is 
deeply urgent that we should put the 
past behind us and associate ourselves 
whole-heartedly with this America 
which is indeed as much our America 
as it is the America of the men and 



116 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

women whose fathers fought at Lex- 
ington. 

The time has, indeed, come to for- 
get grievances and to forget other 
things beside grievances. The time 
has come not only for Fritz and Hein- 
rich to put behind them sentimental 
memories, but for their more prosper- 
ous brethren to forget those "German 
interests" which in the time of national 
peril, they are still seeking to con- 
serve. For many Americans of Ger- 
man blood are still straddling, anx- 
ious to serve America as much as 
personal safety demands, but eager not 
to do anything that will make it im- 
possible for them, after the war, to 
renew those profitable "German con- 
nections" which, in former days, 
helped them to bread and butter and 
jam. 

This is not a safe time for neutrals 
or straddlers or for men who indig- 
nantly assert their complete American- 
ism even while they keep one eye 
cocked to Germany's trade after the 
war. 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 117 

It is a safe time only for men capa- 
ble of heroic decisions. 

The choice we are asked to make is 
a hard choice. It is a choice that the 
English colonists made when they 
fought their mother country. It is a 
choice that many men both South and 
North made during the Civil War 
against their own fathers and brothers. 
It is a choice which the German Revo- 
lutionists of 1848 made when they 
fought against fellow Germans who 
denied them the institutions of free 
men. In 1776 in America, in 1848 
in Germany, the principle of per- 
sonal liberty was involved, and men 
who loved liberty chose to fight their 
own flesh and blood rather than sacri- 
fice a principle which they knew was 
fundamental. They made the diffi- 
cult choice and we honor them today 
as heroes. 

Who remembers the men who ruled 
Prussia in 1848? But all the world 
remembers the men who defied Prus- 
sia — Kinkel, Schurz, Herwegh, Frei- 
ligrath. 



118 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

Hear once more the words of Dr. 
Nicolay crying across the sea to us 
from the prison where Prussia has 
confined him — this valiant spirit who 
of all Germany's intellectual leaders 
has been almost the only one to retain 
the ability to think for himself and the 
courage to speak what he thinks. 

"Once upon a time, men loved an 
ideal," he says; "or, if a man was 
without an ideal, he loved certain ma- 
terial advantages, and when a man 
believed that he could realize this ideal 
or these material benefits in or by 
means of the country where he dwelt 
and where he had been born, he loved 
that country as the bearer of that ideal, 
fought for that country, sacrificed him- 
self for that country. But when that 
country of his failed to satisfy that 
ideal, he cast it from him, stood sadly 
apart (for no one finds it pleasant to 
stand alone) or even fought against 
his country. 

"It is just the noblest men and 
women in history who have so acted." 

Our fathers are among those "no- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 119 

blest" folk. With deep pride we re- 
member it. 

They had a high ideal and fought 
their own rulers to attain it. They 
failed and left their home-land, to 
pursue in the New World that ideal of 
liberty that could find no breathing- 
space in the Old. 

Today, for the same great ideal, we 
their descendants are asked to make a 
choice similar to the choice they made 
before us. Have we the vision, have 
we the moral courage to make it? 
Shall our children walk with heads 
high henceforth? Or shall they walk, 
lonely, unhappy, sullen, rebellious, 
with bowed heads and averted faces, 
hated by Germany, scorned and dis- 
trusted by America? 

On us depends their fate. 

America is at war with Germany. 
Soon American armies will be clash- 
ing with German armies. Our lists 
of dead and wounded will then con- 
tain not ten or twenty names but 
twenty hundred and twenty thousand. 
It is then that the bitterness and agony 



120 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

of war will bite into the hearts of the 
American people. It is then that 
America will begin to hate, as Ger- 
many began to hate after the Marne, 
and England began to hate after Ypres 
and Neuve Chapelle. It is then that 
anti-German hysteria will sweep over 
this country until every man with Ger- 
man blood in his veins and a German 
name and German words on his lips 
will become Anathema to the stricken 
mothers and fathers of fallen sons; 
unless — 

Unless we, Americans of German 
origin, stand forth now, individually 
and collectively, openly and abso- 
lutely, for America and against Ger- 
many; in no way denying our blood, 
in no way denying the heritage of 
our fathers; but, rather, asserting 
them, crying, "America, look on us! 
Much have we received, much is re- 
quired of us. Behold, assuredly it 
shall be said of us that we who re- 
ceived freely, when the need came, 
freely give!" 

If we stand forth thus, unmistak- 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 121 

ably, there will run a cheer from one 
end of this country to the other that 
will shake thrones, and hearten lovers 
of liberty and democracy in every 
trench and camp not only among the 
armies of America and the Allies, but 
among the armies of Germany herself. 
There will be no anti-German hysteria 
then, no persecution of men with Ger- 
man names. For America and then 
the world will see at last clearly that 
this is not a war of many nations 
against the Teuton race, but a war of 
men of every race who love liberty 
and justice against a System which 
stands on despotism and force. 

We have the opportunity to make 
America and the rest of the world, 
now, even while they smite German 
autocracy, to respect and even love 
men of German blood; we have the 
opportunity, after the War, to work 
as no one else can work for mutual 
forgiveness and reconciliation. 

We have that opportunity if we take 
our stand firmly, squarely, unmistak- 
ably now for America and her cause. 



122 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

If we do not take our stand thus, if 
we continue to appear neutral, to give 
not our hearts but only the work of 
our hands to America's battle — noth- 
ing that we can say or do in the future 
will check the wave of feeling against 
all men and all things of German 
name or origin, that is bound to rise 
when the War begins actually to 
strike the American people in its ten- 
derest spot, the home. If we do not 
speak today without equivocation 
nothing we say tomorrow will be 
worth the breath it takes to utter it. 

For even though peace should come 
today or in a month as many a Ger- 
man-American is rashly confident it 
will come, the problem for the Ameri- 
can of German blood will not be solved 
thereby. The responsibilities of his 
position will be increased as the re- 
strictions incident to a state of war are 
removed from his speech and action. 
Once more hotheads and irresponsi- 
bles may rise up here, there and every- 
where preaching the glories of Ger- 
manism. Once more Congressmen 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 123 

from German-American districts may 
dare to cry, "We must forget party 
and without regard for previous affili- 
ations vote only for those men who are 
the friends of Germanism." 

Woe to the Americans of German 
origin then if they have not made their 
position so clear that no rash and un- 
authorized spokesman can persuade 
other Americans to believe that he is 
actually representative. If, after the 
war, the apostles of divided allegiance 
dare to raise their voices again believ- 
ing that there are German-Americans 
who will give them support, and the 
American people are led to believe 
that the patriotism of the German- 
Americans during the War has been 
the patriotism not of conviction but 
only of convenience, the fury of their 
fellow-citizens will be without measure 
and without restraint. 

We Americans of German origin 
stand at the cross-roads. If we step 
forth now, without hesitation and with- 
out reserve for America and her cause, 
we will be regarded henceforth as 



124 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

Americans and nothing but Americans, 
loved and respected more possibly 
than any other element in our popu- 
lation, because we have been put to 
the greatest test of all and have proved 
faithful to the Republic; if we do not 
so stand forth, on the other hand, we 
will be dug out of the body politic as a 
worm is dug out of an apple, and there 
will be mutual bitterness and dissen- 
sion for generations. 

Let us consider, let us consider 
this! 

I, who have presumptuously taken 
it on myself to address to you these 
words, my fellow-Americans of Ger- 
man blood, I am nothing to you, not 
even a name. I do not appeal to you 
thus because I imagine that I have 
any position or any influence which 
would give my words weight. I have 
no such position or influence. There 
are thousands of Americans of Ger- 
man blood more widely known and 
more influential than I. 

I appeal to you only because I am 



WHERE DO YOU STAND? 125 

one of you. I have been torn as you 
are torn. I love German men and 
women and German forests and hills 
and songs as you love them; I too 
have a father in Germany, I too had 
a German mother; and I, too, have 
brothers fighting in Germany's armies. 
For a time my reason as well as my 
heart was with Germany's cause, and 
even after my reason would no longer 
let me hope for Germany's triumph, 
for a time my heart was still rebel- 
liously thrilled at the news of a Ger- 
man victory. 

So, perhaps, I have a right to speak. 
I have stood on Germany's side, I 
have walked in the valley of the 
shadow of neutrality, I have stood and 
I now stand irrevocably with the 
cause of the Allies which, thank God, 
is now the cause of America. 

And I say to you most solemnly, the 
time has come for us all who are of 
German origin to stand forth and, 
individually and collectively, publicly 
declare ourselves: 

"/, an American citizen of German 



126 WHERE DO YOU STAND? 

blood, believe in America, my coun- 
try, and the principles of liberty, 
equality and democracy for which she 
stands. Therefore, and inevitably, I 
am against Germany, I wish to see 
my country victorious and Germany 
defeated. To the fulfilment of this 
wish I pledge my hands, my heart and 
my spirit,'^ 

In the taking and the keeping of 
that oath or its equivalent lies the 
hope, lies the only hope of the happi- 
ness and the present and future use- 
fulness of Americans of German 
blood. 



THE END 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



T 



HE following pages contain advertisements of books 
by the same author or on kindred subjects. 



You Are the Hope of 
the World 

Decorated boards, 50 cents. 

An Appeal to the Girls 
AND Boys of America 

By HERMANN HAGEDORN 

"Addressed to the girls and boys of America, this little 
book should likewise be read by all their fathers and 
mothers." 

— From Colonel Theodore Roosevelt's 
Fourth of July Oration. 

"A lofty purpose has animated Mr. Hagedorn in his 
exhortation of young America." 

— New York Evening Mail. 

"There is inspiration for boys and girls in Mr, Hage- 
dorn's book. If every public school child ten years old 
and over were compelled to read it the prospects are that 
it would bear fruit in better conditions in the future." 

— Philadelphia Ledger. 



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America Among the Nations 

By H. H. POWERS 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

" One of the most interesting books appearing for ages . . . 
honest as the day and fascinating as a mystery novel." 

— Chicago Herald. 

" A timely work for thinking Americans. . . . Nowhere is our 
position in relation to other nations discussed with greater clear- 
ness and ability than in Professor Powers' book." 

— New York Herald. 

This study of America's position as a world power brings out 
in surprising relief the consistently imperialistic policy followed 
by our country ever since the first settlements. Our expansion 
from the Atlantic border to the Pacific, our annexations of 
Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Alaska, the Philippines, Porto Rico, 
the Canal Zone, etc., all are shown in the light in which they 
impress other countries. The essential solidarity of this coun- 
try with other English speaking peoples is seen as the best guar- 
antee of world peace. 

The Soul of Democracy 

By EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS 

Cloth, i2tno, $1.25 

What at bottom does the war mean? Why has it been our 
war from the beginning? What will be the effect of the war 
upon our social philosophy and upon the future of democracy? 
These are the questions which this volume undertakes to an- 
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efficiency, endurance, and finally for the welfare and progress 
of humanity are studied in a series of vital chapters culminating 
in an analysis of the effect of the war upon socialism, feminism, 
religion, education, and literature. 



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f ublisbers 64-66 Fifth Ayenne New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Great Maze 

and 

The Heart of Youth 

A POEM AND A PLAY 



i2mo. $1.35 



" The two poems in this book, one in the form of a play, 
are of a lofty and moving beauty that has the further grace 
of an exquisite simplicity. ... It is long since words so sharply 
moving and so distinctly beautiful have been given to the 
world. . . . Here ... is sheer poetry, here are thoughts and 
emotions with which it is a high privilege to be associated." 

— New York Times. 

" The testimony of beauty is in Mr. Hagedorn's poem and 
play. . . . He has the poet's passion and vision, and the per- 
fect art with which to clothe them. And he has besides these 
the wisdom of understanding human nature, human life. 

" Beautiful, powerful, unfolding itself from the beginning 
with simply, but imaginatively and melodiously wrought lines 
of blank verse, this poem is the finest thing Mr. Hagedorn has 
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" This is a singularly rich volume in vision and spiritual 
fervor, and gives to Mr. Hagedorn's art the seal of accomplish- 
ment." — Boston Transcript. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Faces in the Dawn 

By HERMANN HAGEDORN 

Cloth^ I2m0f $i.SS 

A great many people already know Mr. Hagedorn through his verse. 
" Faces in the Dawn " will, however, be their introduction to him as a novel- 
ist. The same qualities that have served to raise his poetry above the com- 
mon level help to distinguish this story of a German village. The theme of 
the book is the transformation that was wrought m the lives of an irritable, 
domineering German pastor and his wife through the influence of a young 
German girl and her American lover. Sentiment, humor, and a human feel- 
ing, all present in just the right measure, warm the heart and contribute to 
the enjoyment which the reader derives in following the experiences of the 
well-drawn characters. 

" A Christmas story, unusual and welcome. . . . All the people in the 
tale are real human beings." — N'ew York Times, 

" A good substantial story . . . written in plain, homely, and convincing 
prose." — New York Globe. 



Poems and Ballads 



New Edition. Cloth, ismo, $1.2^ 

" We can see from this volume that Mr. Hagedorn is a truly accomplished 
poet . . . the poems are worth writing and are worth reading, because Mr. 
Hagedorn only writes what he really feels, and this volume will strike in 
many a reader a responsive chord." — Poetry Review (England). 

" Hermann Hagedorn's work suggests a keynote for all future poetry." — 
Alfred Noyes. 

*'. . . contains an unusual amount of pure poetry." — iV^«/ York Times. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Makers of Madness 

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Written with fiiie spirit, dramatic and fascinat- 
ingly interesting, " Makers of Madness " is a contri- 
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which has for its purpose the promotion of interna- 
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the actual conditions in any one nation of Europe, 
it nevertheless contrasts the causes by which war 
might be brought about between a great Continental 
Power and the United States. Throughout the 
intense story there is introduced much significant 
comment on governments and the factors which 
control their relationships. *' Makers of Madness " 
demonstrates that its author is as good a dramatist 
as he is novehst and poet. 



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